


A Pirate's Life for Me

by aster_risk



Category: The Fall (TV 2013), The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, F/F, Stella is a badass pirate captain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-23 16:02:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11405793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: When pirates seeking a mythical treasure take Mulder captive, Scully promises to scour the Caribbean for her missing partner. Venturing into the unknown, she encounters a ship bound by the Jolly Rodger, manned by drowned souls and captained by the alluring Stella Gibson.Swashbuckling romance abounds.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I've been on a Pirates of the Caribbean kick the last few weeks, and it occurred to me that seeing Stella Gibson as a pirate would make a significantly better story than at least the last two movies. Pirate movies seem to be unfortunately lacking in the way of lesbians and Gillian Anderson.
> 
> This is the unholy brainchild of my pirate obsession and love of The Fall.

_Mulder shouldered his rucksack and smoothed his overcoat. Compared to the sleek red uniforms of the soldiers marching two by two aboard the Macbeth, Mulder's ruffled, haphazard appearance stood out like a sore thumb. "You’ll watch over my study, won't you Scully?"_

 

_“Your archives are safe in my hands," she promised. She reached out and straightened his collar. "You may be a civilian, but you deserve every ounce of their respect. It might be easier for you to take command if you look that part."_

 

_“Thank you, Scully.” He wrapped her tiny frame in his arms, and she felt a pin come loose in her complicated updo. When he released her, his eyes crinkled in an earnest smile. “I’ll miss you, for however long I am away. But the truth is out there, and if I do not return from the sea, know that I died searching for it.”_

 

_“Mulder,” she held his prematurely weathered cheeks in her hands, “just promise me you’ll know when to stop. Keep in mind that you're on an exploratory vessel, not a warship. If the Macbeth is attacked, you stand no chance, so please be careful where you go and what you do. And if you find yourself in trouble, do not hesitate to ask for help.” Mulder loved the sea and every legend that came with it, and he was unafraid of the dangers they may pose._

 

_“It’s a troublesome world out there, Scully. We all have to go through it.” Mulder found trouble more easily than most men, and while Scully doubted there would ever come a day when she was unwilling to stand by him, she hoped he wouldn't put himself in cannon fire for the sake of knowledge and understanding. This time, he was running off where she couldn't follow, couldn't be a voice of reason in the face of myths and remind him of his limits._

 

_“If word reaches Port Washington that something’s happened, you know I’ll search all seven seas for you,” she said, the worry lines in her forehead deepening._

 

_His grin widened. "You'll come to my rescue."_

 

_“Don’t doubt it. I have only to leverage my father's name for a ship and pick up a wild buccaneer crew.” She smiled and cocked her eyebrows, poorly disguising her apprehension._

 

_“Scully.” His gaze darkened. "To be serious, do not put your life on hold on my account.”_

 

_“There’s little I would not put on hold for you.” She pushed him toward the boat. “Go, Mulder. They’re about to raise the bridge.”_

 

_He had made himself a quest, and she would not keep him. His heart was seabound, and she could do nothing but bolster his courage and keep watch over his archives in his absence. She left the dock before his ship raised anchor, not wanting to trap herself in a band of wives waving their husbands goodbye. She was most certainly not Fox Mulder’s wife, and she hated to draw out the moment—it made her farewells feel all the more final._

 

 _Lifting her skirts, she marched back to the carriage and ordered the driver to take her to the top of the hill. It was a long ride home, up the steep and rocky path to the estate. In a move that had puzzled her to no end as a child, her father had returned from sea twenty years ago lucky, weighed down with the spoils of war, and he'd ordered that a new home be built for his wife and children on the highest point of Port Washington. It was a tedious carriage ride into town, even more so to the port. When she asked her mother why they lived in such a place, she said,_  " _your father wanted this house to be the first thing he saw when he sailed into the bay. And he wanted us to see his ship from miles away and know he was coming home."_

 

_It would have been an endearing prospect, had Lieutenant William Scully ever come home. She could only hope Mulder would not suffer the same fate._

 

 * * *

Scully woke to mid-morning sunlight streaming through the window of Mulder’s office. It was the same dream every night since he'd left—watching him climb aboard the ship and wave his hat to her from the front deck, just as her father had ten years before. A jarring pinch between her ribs reminded her of how she had spent the night.

 

She groaned at the strings of her corset still pulling tightly on her waist and reached behind her back to loosen them.

 

“Good morning, Miss Scully.”

 

Scully startled at the gruff voice behind her.

 

“Good morning, Commodore Skinner,” she breathed, clutching her chest. Skinner was an imposing man from afar—tall, burly, similar in figure to Fox Mulder. But when he stepped into the study, lamp light glinted on his bald head, and with a pair of spectacles askew on his rosy face, he appeared quite fatherly.

 

“Another night guarding Mulder’s files, eh?” he asked darkly. “You ought to be getting more sleep.”

 

“Since when do you visit this cellar solely to remind me of my sleep schedule, Sir? I presume you’re looking for an archive.” She crossed her arms and cocked her eyebrow. Skinner never made it his business to interfere with Mulder’s research—he was a man of logic and order, always buttoned up and bound to the strictest interpretations of the law; Fox Mulder spent his time buried in mythologies, categorizing and studying the legends of the sea.

 

“I’m afraid so, Miss Scully. You’re responsible for any organization of this archival mess, and certain events have come to light which I cannot ignore.”

 

“What events?” Scully demanded, sitting upright on the rickety stool, her back digging into Mulder’s desk. Strands of copper hair dropped into her face, and she felt her updo sag to one side after several hours of fitful sleep.

 

“There’s been talk of the Flying Dutchman near Port Royale, only fifty kilometers from here, and the Lighthouse operator swore he saw a silver ship rise from the sea beneath the very same cliffs that surround our bay.”

 

Scully rolled her eyes. “The Flying Dutchman does not exist. A ship of ghosts, Sir? You’ve clearly spent too much time listening to Mulder’s stories.”

 

“Not nearly as much time as you. Miss Scully. I’m not concerned about the ghostly Flying Dutchman. I’m concerned that multiple men report sightings of a pirate ship lurking around Port Washington. I’ve heard too many first hand accounts of pirates in these waters pillaging any port they dock near.”

 

“Why are you down here, then, sir?”

 

“Because if sailors cry of the Dutchman, it may very well be a real ship, captained by a real pirate. Just not a spectral nightmare.”

 

Scully chewed her lip. She was certainly not one to listen to old wives’ tales, but then, neither was Commodore Skinner.

 

“You want me to locate stories of the Flying Dutchman, Sir?”

 

“Any information you and Mulder have gathered could help us take precautions against a raid, even if his notes seem far-fetched.”

 

“Fair enough.” Scully nodded and got to her feet. She snatched a quill off the desk and slid it through the lopsided bun in her hair, twisting it until it tightened and held in place. Still slightly bleary-eyed, she turned to the cabinet in the office’s darkest corner. She had ordered Mulder’s archives by each letter of the alphabet when she first began to assist him as the Governor’s official archivist. Commodore Skinner had, at the time, been astonished at her level of literacy, but had come to realize that Scully was a far more learned woman than was the expectation in Port Washington.

 

Her father had taught her to read when she was young, after she told him she wanted to pursue medicine as a career. Her mother had been skeptical at first—after all, she had done well for herself mostly illiterate, and Dana Scully’s odds of practicing medicine as a woman in an English merchant colony were virtually nil, when the only doctor in Port Washington had refused to take a woman as his apprentice.

 

Fortunately, she had stumbled upon Commodore Skinner, searching for a learned assistant to the archivist. She’d found herself dusting off mythologies and researching pirates in a cellar with none other than Port Washington's official archivist, Fox Mulder.

 

Her first act as his partner had been to tidy his disaster of a study. Her second had been to debunk his theories about the existence of Davy Jones’ Locker, but she hadn’t quite persuaded him as to its nonexistence.

 

“Scully,” Skinner pressed, eyeing the cabinet. “What is there of the Dutchman?”

 

“Common legend says it is captained by Davy Jones himself, but legends are hardly grounds for concern,” she scoffed, counting down the drawers. “And Mulder took most writings with him.”

 

“But of the Dutchman?”

 

She procured slips of loose parchment from a corner drawer. “Account of a Frenchman in 1680 AD calls it ‘a ship that sails itself, captained by a grizzled old man.’ More recently, a bartender in Los Barriles swears he spotted the Dutchman on his walk home from the pub. It ‘flew up from the waves and glowed silver, as if it were haunted or something of the sort.’”

 

Skinner raised his eyebrows. “Is that it?”

 

“If you expected substantial, factual accounts you’ve come to the wrong place, Sir.”

 

“I suppose I have.” He tipped his hat to her.

 

“Good day, sir.” Scully turned back to her paperwork, waiting to hear the click of his shoes upon the floorboards and the stairwell’s distinctive creak. Nothing came. “Sir?” She turned around again to see him clutching his hat formally in both hands, his hairless forehead shining.

 

“Miss Scully, I did not come just to be bombarded with legends. I bear news of Mister Mulder.”

 

Skinner sighed and pinched his forehead. His fingers fiddled with the golden buttons on his uniform, and his spectacles slid further toward the tip of his nose. He looked positively exhausted. “A ship from the West India Company docked this morning. They rescued three members of the Macbeth’s crew near a remote archipelago. The men claim their ship was overrun by pirates.”

 

She’d heard this story before—the same tale as preluded an announcement of her father’s death.

 

“Most of the crew were thrown overboard, but—”

 

“So Mulder is dead,” she finished. She steeled her face, crossed her arms over her chest. Skinner was not a man she wanted to cry before.

 

“Fox Mulder has been taken captive.”

 

She couldn’t immediately decide if that was better or worse than dead. Perhaps he was doomed to vanish as his sister had, never to be heard from again. No one would know what became of him, and she would live with the wondering for the rest of her life. But captive meant he had a chance of rescue, if only she could find him.

 

She stared at Skinner through glass blue eyes. “Did they say anything else? The name of a port, or a ship, or a man?”

 

Skinner shook his head solemnly. “Nothing. These were young sailors, Miss Scully; any man on the Macbeth with enough days at sea to recognize a pirate’s vessel twice is likely drowned.”

 

“We must give pursuit!” Scully gathered the papers strewn across the desk and shoved them into a random drawer. “I want to be aboard a ship by this evening.” She rolled up her sleeves and smoothed her skirt. “You have the authority to give pursuit of whatever ship took the Macbeth, and I know the ports where Mulder would have landed.”

 

“Governor Spender is already on board the Chiron, seeking to eradicate any ship within a thousand kilometers that sails under the skull and crossbones. He ordered that I not let another warship leave Port Washington. I’m sorry, Scully. I cannot give chase.”

 

Scully couldn’t believe what she was hearing—giving chase was the Commodore’s job. He was a commander of the Royal Navy, not the captain of a makeshift merchant militia. Rationally, she supposed it was indeed foolish to try to rescue Mulder from a ship they could neither recognize nor locate, but good God, wasn’t their duty to try?

 

“I can use my father’s name,” Scully insisted. “I can get us the fastest ship in the Atlantic.” Her father had been well-respected and fairly successful in the Royal Navy. The Scully name might not earn her command of a ship, as a woman, but it might earn her the right aboard one.

 

Skinner glanced over his shoulder and kicked the cellar door shut. His face looked ruddy in the pale morning light, revealing perhaps more anxiety than he intended. “My hands are tied, Miss Scully.” He leaned awkwardly toward her, and she resisted the urge to turn away from the nervous officer. “A word of advice to you: the only people who know how to find pirates are better pirates. Were you to act rashly, I could not stop you—as I said, my hands are tied.”

 

The trust and blessing of a commodore, Scully mused as Skinner whispered gruffly into her ear, were as useful as his rank. Possibly more so.

 

Skinner straightened himself out and smoothed the wrinkles in his uniform. He tipped his hat to her. “Good day. I’m truly sorry about Mister Mulder’s fate.” He walked stiff-legged to the door. Then he stopped. “Miss Scully, one more thing,” he said over his shoulder, meeting her gaze in the corners of his eyes. “Better pirates carry pistols. I would hate to lose you and Mulder both.”

 

Then he was gone.

* * *

The late Lieutenant William Scully’s office was a family museum, filled with artifacts that in an unspoken rule, neither Scully nor her mother dared move from their places. It had gathered dust in the years since her father’s passing, and Scully felt like a grave-robber as she entered the unlocked room.The bookshelf lay askew; volumes of Descartes, Voltaire, Galileo decorated the floor. She’d lain awake many a night and perused those volumes, always careful to return them exactly where she’d found them, however disorganized it appeared. Her father’s rapier, which used to hang in a case over the fireplace, was the scene's only missing piece.

 

Her father had kept his flintlock pistol in his top right desk drawer. He had his standard issue rifle with him when he died, but this handheld pistol was his greatest pride, aside from his children. Scully opened the drawer and took it out.

 

It was an exquisite weapon, hand-crafted in London. Ornately carved into its handle, a ship bested storm-ravaged seas. When she was a child, her father told her he confiscated it from a pirate the very first time he defeated a ship, and as a reward for his effort his commander had allowed him to keep it. After he died, Scully's mother had told her that in actuality, she’d forced him to order the pistol before his family came to Port Washington, because they hadn't known the nature of their new home until they'd arrived. Pirates had been the subjects of entertaining stories before her father’s death. After, they were only scoundrels who took life without cause.

 

She had no intention of becoming a pirate to save Mulder’s life; she was an upstanding woman. But sometimes, the rules needed to be bent for the greater good. Sometimes, as Mulder’s incessant barrage of pirate legends had taught her, a lawful man could be evil, and an act of piracy could be an act of heroism. She only hoped the Lieutenant Governor would see it that way when—if—she returned. After all, she wasn't going to  _steal_ a ship. She would simply leverage her surname and neglect to inform the Navy that she would be sailing with a questionable crew. Better yet, she would find a pirate who already _had_ a ship.

 

Scully strapped the pistol’s hip holster around her waist. It was surprisingly heavy, but nothing unreasonable compared to the dresses she’d grown accustomed to wearing. Buckling the holster, she felt as though she’d usurped Mulder’s job—pursuing rash ideas, making things up as she went. But as Commodore Skinner had informed her, there was no other course of action if she wanted to see Mulder alive.

 

She glanced around the room for anything else she might need. She tucked two maps into her coat, along with a hand-held compass and a handful of extra bullets. Then she moved for the door.

 

“What in God’s name are you doing in here, Dana?” Her mother burst into the office in a fluster. She sized up Scully from head to toe, taking in her daughter’s linen shirt and breeches, clunky boots and sacred pistol. Her eyes grew wide, and her lips trembled.

 

“Not you too.” She looked like she might crumble on the spot, but Scully knew her mother was a tougher woman than she appeared.

 

“Mother, I’m going after Mulder.” She raised her chin, tried to appear as though seeing the pain in her mother’s eyes didn't kill her.

 

“Good God Dana, you look like a young man, with that stubborn look on your face, just like your father. But you’re not your father. You’re a woman of respectable social standing, and you ought to make better use of the opportunities your father has given to you.” She knew her mother only wanted the best. She wanted her to be content, to live comfortably without danger. She didn’t want to lose another daughter, and Scully didn’t blame her.

 

Scully placed a hand on her mother’s trembling arm. “I’m sorry. Mulder needs my help.”

 

“Dana, Fox Mulder is such a fine man. Why wouldn’t you marry him before he left?”

 

“He didn’t ask.”

 

Maggie Scully huffed. “You know what I mean, Dana. You wouldn’t have told him yes, had he asked. If you would put your life at risk to save him, why didn’t you simply marry him and settle down?”

 

“We are partners, close as can be; we work together during every hour of the day, and at night we go our separate ways.” That was how it had always been; that was how it would be.

 

“I worry about you. I worry you’ll never be happy here.” Her mother might be right—she might never be happy with the role the world had cut out for her. “Yet it tears me up like this to see you get your sea legs and leave. I worry even more that I might never see you again, just like—”

 

“Just like Melissa,” Scully finished, eyeing the empty sword case above the fireplace, remembering the day her sister had stolen the sword and ran off with a mystic and a Navy deserter. John Doggett and Monica Reyes, those were their names. Last she’d heard, they were exploring the Indian Ocean independent from any company or government.

 

“I’m still going after Mulder,” she said. “I may face punishment, and I may face death, but I cannot stand by and wait for news knowing he’s out there, in need of help.”

 

Maggie eyebrows softened at that answer; her body, once frozen in place, seemed to relax or at least give up. She would never understand the sea-longing in her children’s bones, and she would probably never be happy seeing them disappear into the open ocean. But she would accept it, as she had with her husband. Scully could ask of her mother nothing more than that.

 

“Don’t waste the shots in that pistol,” she said, drawing her daughter close. “Each bullet has a piece of your father’s soul. He would want you to have it, and he would want to be close to you. Keep it that way.”

 

Scully nodded and buried her face into her aging mother’s shoulder one last time. A tear rolled down Maggie’s cheek as she took in her daughter—trousers, handgun, and all. Maggie tucked a strand of her daughter’s red hair behind her ear, revealing her wet eyes and ruddy cheeks.“I should still hope to see you in a wedding dress one day. If only to imagine that you will be alive to get married. But you know better than I where your heart lies, and I won’t deny it what it needs, no matter what that may be.”

 

Scully broke into a tearful smile. “I love you, Mama. Good-bye.” Then before she could hear another word, she pushed through the doors and strode to the carriage waiting outside her home. To Los Barriles, the port of pirates, and then to who knows where.


	2. The Tale of Davy Jones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enter pirate Stella.

Scully wound her way through the cracked cobblestone of Los Barriles, her right hand resting firmly on her father’s flintlock pistol. She would not call herself experienced with a pistol, for she’d never had occasion to use one, but its presence at her hip comforted her, and—or so she liked to think—intimidated any would-be assailants.

 

After all, Los Barriles was not famed for its morals. The inlet town, built around a makeshift port only a few kilometers from Port Washington, attracted washed up sailors and buccaneers seeking to set their feet on dry land without running into the British Navy. Pirates were rumored to make port at Los Barriles on moonless nights, to fill their freshwater barrels in one of the area’s countless springs.

 

Pirates, Scully mused, were at once her greatest concern and the very reason she came here at this late hour. She’d had no encounters of her own with legendary scourges of the sea; all she knew of pirates came from Mulder’s legends and her father's death. The Flying Dutchman lurked at the front of her mind, but she dispelled it—myths of the undead had no place in Mulder’s rescue.

 

Scully wrinkled her nose as she stepped over the threshold of the Blue Baron. The muggy tavern air smelled of salt and rum and decaying fish, clinging to her skin and sticking in her throat as she breathed. Three men stood off with rapiers on the second floor balcony. A rat scurried across the floor, and then a flurry of wings dropped into view and snatched it in glinting talons, carrying it to an empty table. A pale owl perched on a chair and promptly ripped off the rat’s head, its heart-shaped face staring curiously at Scully. Lingering in the doorway, she stared back, mesmerized—it was a fascinating creature, elegant and ruthless.

 

A sudden gunshot rang out behind her, and she stepped decidedly into the tavern. As she scanned for a safe seat, she brushed a smudge of dirt off her trousers—a practical item of clothing her upright mother had not been too thrilled that she’d purchased. Her mother always meant well, of course, and had been nothing if not the rock of her family, especially since her sister had left and her brothers joined the Navy. She had come to terms with the trousers, though, just as she would come to terms with Scully's absence. Her acceptance of her daughter's decision required as much courage—if not more—than walking into a pirate bar in search of a rescue party.

 

Sitting down at the bar, she wondered if she’d ever see her mother or Bill or Charlie again. If she did find herself a ship and crew to chase down Mulder’s captors, would she live to lay eyes on Port Washington and the white cliffs upon which her home rested?

 

“Can I get you anything today, Miss?” The scraggly man behind the counter gave her a toothless smile.

 

“Pint, please,” she said, eyeing the murky, probably illicit bottles of rum and ale shared between the Blue Baron’s patrons.

 

“Of what?”

 

“Whatever’s closest.” She would need a little liquid courage to ask one of these sea-weathered men for help.

 

“Pint of rum, it is.” He slid it over the counter.

 

Scully took a couple gulps of the foul stuff. “Yo ho and a bottle of rum,” she muttered cynically, if only to disguise her apprehension. Drinking in Los Barriles at this time of night, she felt well on her way to becoming a pirate herself. Once, she’d vowed never to associate with the skull and crossbones—it had become a herald of death in her mind, ever since her father had been slain under its wrath. Desperate times called for desperate measures, of course, but she considered herself an honest (if proudly rebellious) woman. Even trifling with the sailors in the Blue Baron she would hold to her morals.

 

“So,” the raggedy barman leaned over the counter, and she could smell at least three types of whiskey on his lips. “What brings a young lass pretty as you to Los Barriles?”

 

“Actually,” she said, leaning away from his intruding features, “I’m looking for a pirate.”

 

He grinned, and his grey eyes swept the bar knowingly. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

 

“My friend—a man by the name of Fox Mulder—was aboard the Macbeth, which left Port Washington a fortnight past. Last I’ve heard, pirates sunk the vessel and took him as their prisoner.” She hardened her jaw and wrinkled her brow, stubborn purpose settling comfortably into her typically soft face. “I aim to bring him back.” She reached into the pocket of her trousers and brought out a handful of doubloons. “Three are for the pint; the other five are for anything you can tell me about who sunk the Macbeth.”

 

The bartender scratched the stubble on his neck, then scooped the coins off the counter. “I don’t think I could tell you who,” he confessed, “but I’ve heard of a ship.”

 

“By what name?”

 

“The Claudius. A man passed through this morning, said the Claudius had destroyed a British vessel and taken its navigator aboard. No negotiations, no parlay. They just took him—doesn’t happen too often.”

 

That sounded promising. Scully opened her mouth but found herself interrupted before she could respond.

 

“The Claudius, you said?” A woman’s voice, classy and weathered, piped up from the far corner of the room. There, a blonde woman in a red-feathered hat rested with her boots propped up on a small table. Shaded beneath the brim of her hat, her face was all cheekbones and chiseled poise, calculating blue eyes fixed on Scully. Her pint of whiskey trembled as two men began to grapple on the tavern floor.

 

“And are you familiar with that ship?” Scully asked, staring down the imposing newcomer to her conversation.

 

“Aye, I am.”

 

“Last I heard, it was sailing toward an impossible island, seeking an impossible treasure,” said the bartender. He turned back to Scully. “Maybe that’s why they’ve got your navigator friend on board.”

 

It made sense—Mulder had brought dozens of maps with him, most of them limited to the confines of reality, but some supposedly leading to mythical treasures and islands of the dead. Mulder had a reputation for knowing (and believing) every sea legend he stumbled upon. Scully always considered it her duty to keep his feet on the ground.

 

“Do you know what they might be searching for?” Scully asked.

 

“I know what they seek,” the woman in the corner said gravely. She got to her feet and approached them with a slow swagger to her step—sea legs, possibly, or the confidence of the world-weary. She was dressed in trousers and black embroidered waistcoat belted at the waist with a hip holster. (It seemed Skinner was right about pirates and pistols.) She sat down beside Scully and leaned close, her aquiline profile made harsher in the pale candlelight. “They sail for the heart of Davy Jones.”

 

Intimidated as she was, Scully stifled a snort. She’d heard quite enough about Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman from Commodore Skinner that morning. Were the circumstances not so grave, she might find it funny that Mulder’s favorite sailors’ tale would be the motivation for his capture.

 

“Davy Jones is only a story told to frighten would-be mutineers.” She chuckled grimly. “‘Take me orders or ye be sent to Davy Jones’s Locker’ and ‘the Flying Dutchman will scavenge your soul from the depths of the sea’ and so on. Someone to blame when a man drowns or a ship disappears.”  

 

The barman seemed slightly horrified—or perhaps offended—and the woman rather amused, the corners of her mouth lifted into the slightest smirk.

 

“Have you ever heard the story of Davy Jones?” the barman asked in a reverent hush.

 

Scully arched her eyebrows. “Only the part where he cuts his heart out and buries it on some God forsaken island.”

 

“Oh, there’s more to it than that, Missy." He lowered his voice and leaned close to the two women. "Davy Jones was once a ruthless young pirate by the name of Captain Philip Padgett Jones. He sailed the Flying Dutchman over these very seas with a crew of human devils, and as tribute to his victories, Padgett cut out the hearts of the Lord and Lady of every port he raided and collected them in an iron chest. For his beastly cruelty, he earned himself the nickname Davy Jones—the Devil Jones. But evil as he was, Padgett was also a gifted poet, and for each poem he finished he would wrap it around a human heart and drown it in the sea.

 

“For ten years, he terrorized these waters. But one night, he found only a woman in Lord’s house, and when he cut out her heart she revealed herself as the goddess Athena. The goddess was furious that Captain Padgett had abused his talents and defiled the poetry she guarded so fiercely.

 

“Filled with grief and remorse at having angered the goddess he worshipped every time he wrote, Padgett cut his own heart from his body and placed it in the iron chest. But Athena wasn’t finished. She cursed Padgett for his crimes, dooming him to sail the Flying Dutchman with the tortured souls of his victims until the day someone put the same knife through his heart that he used to carve it out. He could only touch land once every ten years, a penance for the ten years he sailed the living ocean. Now, alone but for the dead, Padgett truly became Davy Jones. And he would terrorize the seven seas, unable to be sunken or killed, until someone found his heart and stabbed it through.”

 

Scully listened, wide-eyed, as the barman finished his story. Even if it was an old wives’ tale, she couldn’t help her curiosity, and this grizzled old man certainly knew how to captivate his audience. “Did anyone kill him?”

 

The barman shrugged. “I don’t know who would. According to legend, he who stabs the heart must take its place as captain of the Flying Dutchman.”

 

“I don’t know,” the blonde woman mused beside Scully, drumming her fingers on the counter. “It hardly seems like too awful a fate.” Scully gaped at her, but the lines in the woman’s face told of the hardships which informed her opinion.

 

The barman shivered. “Terrible, if you ask me. Imagine watching your brothers and sisters, your wife and children, aging and dying without you.”

 

“If you have none of those, the grief is spared.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Scully interjected decisively. “Everything aside, it’s still just a ghost story.”

 

“One day,” said the mysterious woman airily, “the truth of these tales might surprise you.”

 

Scully crossed her arms. “Who are you?” she demanded, tired of the nonchalance with which this woman had inserted herself into Scully's quest.

 

The woman cocked her eyebrow. “Captain Stella Gibson,” she said, holding out a hand. “Stella to you.”

 

Tentatively, Scully shook it. “Dana Scully. Just call me Scully.” It was what Mulder called her, and she’d grown accustomed to it.

 

“And your friend—Mulder, wasn’t it—is trapped aboard the Claudius.”

 

Scully dipped her chin in assent. “I believe so.”

 

“Well, I can tell you with no small amount of certainty that the Claudius’s captain doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether you believe in the Flying Dutchman. He wants the heart of Davy Jones, and he won’t let something like rationality get in his way.”

 

“It’s a good thing I don’t aim to negotiate with him, then,” Scully said calmly.

 

“I’m curious what you plan to do, Miss—Scully, was it? I don’t doubt your fortitude, but one person is hardly enough to man a sizable ship, much less send it to battle.” Stella leaned her chin on her hand, elbow digging into the counter. She slapped three coins on the table and slid them to the barman. He left to fetch her another pint.

 

“What would _you_ suggest doing, then?” Scully challenged. It wasn’t as if she could concoct a detailed strategy from some pub in Los Barriles. If she were being honest, she had a mind to simply sneak on board the Claudius, free Mulder, and sail home. She'd spend as little time in the company of pirates as possible; certain as she was that not _all_ pirates had slain her father, she would rather not be lumped in with law-flouting buccaneers. Realistically, of course, she needed a better plan.

 

Stella cocked one eyebrow. “I have a ship.”

 

“How lovely for you.”

 

“You could sail with me. I aim to pursue the Claudius myself, and I know exactly where to find it.”

 

She’d mentioned that something of hers was aboard the hostile ship, and Scully suddenly found herself quite curious as to what that thing was.

 

“And why should I trust you?” She remembered something Mulder had told her years ago, reading two contradictory accounts of a Greek pirate. _Trust no one, Scully,_ he had said. Everyone had a bias.

 

“I never told you to trust me,” said Stella flippantly. “I’m simply making you an offer—we leave tonight, find the Claudius; I fetch my lost items, and you fetch your imprisoned man. I could use your help, and you could certainly use mine.”

 

“Don’t you have a crew?”

 

She shrugged half-heartedly. “My crew can only do so much.”

 

“Why me?”

 

Another half-shrug. “You seem competent. You have your wits about you, and you carry a pistol. Do you know how to use it?”

 

“Not particularly well,” Scully admitted.

 

“A sword, then?”

 

“I can effectively fight with a sword, but I don’t _have_ one.” Her father had taught her swordplay when she was young, in case she ever found herself in trouble. This probably wasn’t the situation he’d had in mind.

 

“Well that’s easy enough to find.”

 

The barman returned with her pint of ale. “Here you are, Miss.” He beckoned for Scully to lean closer and pointed to a wiry young man a table away from her. He looked beaten, despite his youthful face; his tri-corner hat had a patch on the brim, and his breeches were torn at the knee as if from a knife.

 

“See him?” asked the barman. “His name is John Jack.”

 

“Quite a name,” Scully muttered.

 

“Says he’s got a ship and a crew ready to leave the dock. All he needs is a direction, and he’ll bring your friend back for you within the month.”

 

“Well that’s not going to do.” Scully lifted her chin. “I have every intention of being on that ship myself to see things go as planned.”

 

But the barman only laughed. “You’ve some spirit, Miss, and I can’t fault you that. But it’s bad luck to have a woman aboard, and you’ll find no one here willing to bring that upon themselves.”

 

“Oh?” Beside Scully, Stella fixed the barman with a cold stare. “I wouldn’t necessarily say no one.”

 

He looked skeptical. “Captain Stella Gibson,” he tried her name on his tongue once; then his own aged eyes met hers. “How’d such a woman gain command of her own vessel, eh?”

 

“Gunpowder,” she responded with a quirk of her lips, “like an upstanding pirate.”

 

Scully swallowed a mouthful of musky air. Perhaps she was in over her head, if her only ally was a proud-grinning pirate. But what had she expected in Los Barriles? Everyone here committed treason for a living. They were all pirates; if nothing else, she’d happened upon a smart one, who dared not underestimate her for her sex.

 

“And Captain Gibson,” the barman urged, “are you plagued with rotten luck?”

 

Stella downed the last of her drink. “That depends on who you ask.”

 

The tavern door burst open to reveal a burly, red-bearded man with a scimitar, who ducked his head simply to fit in the doorway. The room fell silent as he marched across the floor, creaking its rotten wood with every step. Fist-fighting crewmates froze in their places, following him with their eyes, and men around the tavern had their hands on the hilts of their sabres in case of a scrabble. Even Stella, leaning calmly against the counter, kept her sword firmly in grip.

 

He stopped in the center of the tavern, swayed for a moment, and Scully noticed the wildness in his eyes. He was likely just drunken and angry. He took a swig from an empty bottle of rum and turned a circle around the room. All eyes were on him.

 

“It’s here,” he croaked in a voice like splitting rock. “I saw it, I tell ye. I was filling barrels at the spring, and I saw it.”

 

Stella narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “Saw what?” she asked slowly.

 

“The ship of demons.”

 

Scully rolled her eyes. All this talk of demons and curses and women bearing sour luck; pirates were a superstitious lot, clearly, for she saw no more evidence to support their claims than she had Mulder’s.

 

But the red-bearded pirate seemed genuinely spooked. Perhaps the sea was playing tricks on him, as it often did on these foggy nights. He had the entire bar on edge, as well.

 

“What ship?” Stella asked again, more sharply this time.

 

His lips trembled as he said in a hush, “The Flying Dutchman.”

 

Immediately, chaos erupted once more in the tavern, but it wasn’t a rowdy, lively chaos as before. This chaos was perilous, as every patron raced for the door. Gunshots echoed in her ears as one man blew a hole in the window and leapt out. Scully leapt behind the counter and crouched beside the barman as a bottle flew over their heads, the back of her red ponytail pressing uncomfortably against the wall.

 

“What do they think they're doing?” she hissed. “Risking their lives to escape a mythical ship.”

 

“S’not a matter of whether the Dutchman is real, Missy,” said the barman. “They’ve heard tales, each more horrible than the last.”

 

One man leapt the counter and snatched handful of money from the box of nightly earnings. He glanced sidelong at the barman. “Get out of here while you have a chance!” he urged before jumping out the shattered window. The barman didn’t try to stop him, only sighed.

 

“They’re taking what they can before they go—to their ships or the afterlife, only time will tell.”

 

“Do you believe the Flying Dutchman is really here?” She couldn’t help asking—Skinner’s words had stuck in her mind. Perhaps the Dutchman, for all the tall tales it spawned, was a living ship commanded by living men. After all, what was the old saying—dead men tell no tales.

 

“I can’t say,” he confessed, but she could hear the panic in his voice. “But I seen it myself, once, back when I was a seaman. I woke up one morning, and through the dawn mist, I could see a ship with the pirate colors flying high. I readied the cannons, but when it got closer I saw only one man aboard. And the ship, it had crabs on its flanks like it'd touched the ocean floor. I went to the crow’s nest for a better look, but when I opened my spyglass, it just sank. Thought I’d just watched a man drown, but then I looked to the water, and its silver sails passed me, just beneath the waves.”

 

He shivered. “Don’t y'dare tell me I dreamed it, Missy. The water’s a lot bigger than you think it is; just wait and see. Y’don’t know what’s out there.”

 

Scully didn’t know what to make of the barman. Compared to the rest of this place, he seemed reasonable. “I suppose I will have—”

 

A rapier poked through the barman’s chest. A little scream escaped her mouth, and she clapped her hand to her throat. She grabbed his limp shoulders and shook, but he didn't stir. His dark eyes were already glassed over when she slapped his cheek. Good God, she hadn’t even learned his name.

 

A pair of rough hands seized her by the collar. She looked up to the bulging eyes of the same young pirate who’d offered her his services earlier—John Jack. “Sorry, pretty lady,” he growled, “but I've got to take my plunders and run.” He pulled her toward him, over the dead barman’s legs. Her hands scrabbled at the floor; she reached for her pistol but found the holster empty.

 

“Looking for this?” The man taunted, waving her pistol in his free hand. When he sneered, his gold earrings flashed. His breath smelled sour, a mixture of whiskey and aged grime. It was the jolt of reality Scully needed. Gritting her teeth, she kicked with all her might at his knees. They buckled, and he released his grip on her shirt-scruff, stumbling backwards into the fray.

 

Scully crawled away desperately, back over the barman’s corpse, and scrambled to her feet. She elbowed her way through the crowd, searching for an exit. The Blue Baron was an absolute wreck, with men plundering goods left and right, killing each other over gold pieces and running into the streets, presumably to set sail.

 

“Not so fast.” John Jack grabbed her ankle, tugging her down. He still had her pistol, but by this point she couldn’t care less—her only want was to escape the fray. “Yer coming with me, if I’ve got to drag ye the whole way.” She kicked at his face, but his bony arms held surprising strength.

 

She lost her balance and tumbled to the floor. As John Jack reached for her calf, a black boot crushed his wrist to the floor.

 

“I would let go if I were you,” said Stella Gibson, and if she’d been intimidating before, she sounded now like the first claps of thunder before a hurricane. Scully got up while she had the chance and backed away from the pair. No use fighting without a proper weapon.

 

John Jack didn’t seem to intimidated by Stella, though. He flashed her a charming smile. “Sorry about that,” he breathed, tugging at his smashed fist. Stella cocked her eyebrow like a loaded gun and let him to his feet.

 

“What are you doing?” Scully whispered through clenched teeth. Stella gave no answer, but she’d drawn her sword. The owl once munching on stray rodents rested peacefully on her shoulder. Its head swiveled around, and its coal black eyes met Scully’s in some strange form of reassurance. So the bird belonged to Stella. It was a strange companion, to be sure.

 

When John Jack stood, he was a full head taller than Stella. Scully backed away until her legs pressed against a table. Stella did nothing, and John Jack winked cruelly at Scully over her shoulder. He raised the gun, but Stella didn't budge. Apparently no pirate shied away from a duel, no matter the situation.

 

He cocked the pistol and pulled the trigger, and the shot seemed to bounce off every wall in the Blue Baron. Those who were still pilfering whatever they could find stopped and looked up. Scully could feel her breathing go ragged, as if the bullet had pierced her own chest. She had no sound left to scream with.

 

John Jack grinned his wild, death-heralding grin. He made for Scully, but like lightning, Stella had her rapier blocking his path. Her coat fell open, revealing a white bell-sleeved shirt and a hollow bullet-wound that did not bleed.

 

“Don't waste precious ammunition,” Stella advised with a twitch of her misaligned lips.

 

Scully saw his expression shift from satisfaction to confusion to horror. He shot her again. And again. Two more hollow holes, no blood. The tavern looked on in a haunted silence. Scully kept waiting, in agony, for her to die—a part of her desperately hoped that Stella was as ghostly as she appeared, but her mind wanted only for the scene before her to conform to reason. She waited what felt like minutes for Stella to crumble, but she never did.

 

“You better die fast,” John Jack said, his voice shaking. The pistol fell from his hands. “Or your soul will belong to Davy Jones.”

 

Stella took a step forward. She pulled down the hem of her dirtied shirt. A pale, distinctive scar sliced brutally across the right side of her chest. "I am Davy Jones."

 

Scully choked.

 

“Now return that pistol to its owner or you'll be steering the Flying Dutchman tonight. And don't think we'd sail to Heaven—eternal righteousness is rather dull to me.”

 

He picked up the pistol and handed it to Scully. She holstered it immediately, holding the anxious bile down the back of her throat. Then he fled into the night. Stella turned to Scully.

 

“I apologize if I’ve frightened you, Scully. You’re still welcome aboard the Dutchman, alive and healthy as you are.” Her eyes had lost their fire; they seemed to hold genuine kindness.

 

They were living again.

 

“You’re Padgett,” Scully whispered, horrified.

 

“Absolutely not.” She pursed her lips. “All I share with Philip Padgett is a ship and nickname. It holds that I am Stella to you, should you choose to come aboard.”

 

Scully moved her lips, but no words came out.

 

"Well," said Stella, "I must be off, then.” The bird on her shoulder hooted, and the crowd parted before her as she strode out the door, sword still in hand. Her coattails were the last thing to vanish.

 

Frozen in time, Scully thought of the barman’s stories, of Stella’s—or Davy Jones’s—offer, Stella saving her life despite no obvious motivation to do so, and the advantages of befriending a captain who couldn’t be slain. Wasn’t this what she came for? To find a ship that would take her to Mulder?

 

 _Trust no one,_ Mulder had told her. She was fairly certain he had only meant the living.

 

She gathered her wits and marched after Stella.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I named Los Barriles after an actual fishing town in Mexico. It's called Los Barriles, because supposedly there were so many freshwater springs in the area that pirates would stop there to fill their barrels with drinking water. 
> 
> Also, I'm so invested in pirate Stella I've been asking around to see if anyone will draw her for me because I desperately want to see with my own eyes how she'd look the way I imagine her.


	3. The Flying Dutchman

A storm was brewing over the port when Scully left the Blue Baron. It rolled in like the kraken, with pale arms of lightning and a decisive rumble. On a whim, she scooped up a hat one man had dropped in his rush to escape Davy Jones. She must look ridiculous, she realized, wearing trousers, her brother's far too large shirt and coat, and a pirate’s hat. But truly, if she thought about it, this entire night had been ridiculous, refusing to conform to reason, instead dwelling comfortably in the fictional and absurd.

 

As a child, she would not even have considered the idea of chasing after a pirate or boarding a stranger’s ship. Her father’s passing had shaken her; every night for years she would stand on the cliffs outside her house, hoping to see her father and dreading the day she might see a skull and crossbones flying on the horizon. Meeting Mulder had shifted her perspective—his stories of pirates were upbeat adventures, filled with a gritty, flawed heroism more authentic than tales of knights and lost princesses. She hardly believed them; after all, he spoke of curses and the undead, but she’d begun to consider—perhaps a pirate was simply a person, who like every other person on this Earth, could choose good or evil at any fork in the road. How ironic that it was Mulder held prisoner upon a corsair’s ship and she stowing away with Davy Jones.

 

Scully spotted Stella Gibson's distinctive silhouette stalking decisively through the streets of Los Barriles. Lonesome and light-footed, the dark seemed to stretch her, mask her human shape and transform her into a walking shadow. Though Scully could hear her own heels click ominously as she fought to catch up, the pirate’s boots made no noise against loose cobblestone, nor did the saber she used as a cane.

 

It gave a whole new meaning to ‘silent as the grave.’

 

As she approached, Stella gave no greeting, though Scully was certain she’d heard her footfalls as soon as they’d left the tavern. The bird on Stella’s shoulder cooed and ruffled itself, and Stella raised one spectral hand to smooth its feathers back into place. It was odd—with the the same hand that could so easily threaten Hell upon a stranger, she the owl’s back with surprising tenderness. She was neither a warm living soul nor a cold corpse, evidently trapped somewhere in between.

 

What had she done to earn herself the curse of Davy Jones? Scully still couldn’t shake the sight of three bullets cutting into Stella’s chest, the gross emptiness of the tunnels they left in her flesh. She couldn’t help but stare at the scar above Stella’s right breast and wonder if the weathered woman before had truly cut out her own beating heart and buried in a box, and if she had, what had driven her to take on such a curse?

 

What had she mentioned to the barman, about bad luck— _It depends on who you ask._ Did the endless limbo between life and death sway her in the slightest? She seemed to contradict everything Scully had learned of living creatures—their bodies, their decay in the steady march of time, their innate fear of the dead and of death itself.

 

In one night, Scully felt her perception of reality shatter.

 

She quickened her stride until she was beside Stella. The pirate reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of crushed lead pieces.

 

“I believe these are yours,” she said. “If you can find a blacksmith to re-shape them, they will fire again easily.”

 

It was only after Scully took them that she realized what they were: her bullets. The three bullets John Jack had shot into Stella’s body. She clapped her hand to her mouth and for a second or two considered throwing them into the street behind her. She was more terrified to see them crushed and clean than she would be to see them bloodied and lodged in Stella’s sternum. At least then they would abide by the laws of nature.

 

Instead, she tucked them into her pocket. “Would you really have brought John Jack aboard?” she asked. “The man you let go, would you have sailed him to Hell like you promised?”

 

“Not in the strictest sense,” said Stella. “Though had he rushed at you again, I might have killed him. In the end, Hell is only inescapable if you make it so.”

 

“You let him shoot you.” It seemed a foolish thing to say in hindsight, but it wasn’t everyday Scully saw a woman shot three times walk away unscathed.

 

“So I noticed.”

 

“Why?”

 

Stella hummed softly. “When you’re cursed for all eternity, you find amusement where you can. Not to mention—I wanted no one in my way nor in yours, and the name Davy Jones tends to inspire fear.”

 

“You’re plenty disconcerting without the name.” The owl alone had unnerved Scully at first, fascinating as it was. Looking into an owl’s eyes was like staring into the Underworld, witnessing your own weaknesses and learning the day you will die. They carried a spooky wisdom about them unlike any animal Scully had encountered. Stella was much the same.

 

“Did it hurt when he shot you?”

 

Stella stopped in her tracks and angled her body toward Scully. The bullet holes had turned to fresh white scars, less visible than the slice where her heat was—or should have been.  “Just a pinch,” she said. “Like a little crab clinging to my skin. If you put a knife through this—” she held up her hand, “—it might hurt a little more. But in truth, I have nothing to be hurt. I am shy of a body but hardier than a ghost.”

 

Scully cocked her head. She could see no pulse in Stella’s neck despite the breath escaping her lips and misting the air between them. “You have no heartbeat.”

 

“Not here, no.”

 

“Can I see?” She hoped she was not overstepping boundaries, that Stella had not perceived her request as hostile or invasive. Scully was simply the type of person who wanted to prove everything for herself. To her relief, however her question was perceived, Stella seemed unruffled. She took Scully’s hand and pressed it against her chest. Scully felt the roughness of old and new scars, the jutting ridges of Stella’s collarbones, the silver chain hanging loosely around Stella’s neck. But no heartbeat. She drew a sharp intake of breath—for some reason, this was what she needed to believe Stella’s claims. A shiver ran the course of her spine, Stella’s ice cold skin chilling her body.

 

Frightened and unwilling to show it, she snatched her hand away from Stella’s chest, where above the deep cut of her shirt, an absent heart failed to thump in rhythm.

 

Scully chewed her lower lip. What must it be like to feel a chasm where your heart should beat? How would it feel to be half woman, half phantom? But those seemed like answers she could only understand with experience, and she had no desire to put herself in Stella’s shoes. She couldn’t settle her curiosity, but at some point her questions were bound to cross an unspoken line. She wanted, more than anything, to ask what had driven Stella to take on the Flying Dutchman, but she was uncertain whether Stella would be willing to speak of the matter to a woman she’d only just met. And supposing she got an answer, she was even more uncertain whether she’d still want to leave port with Stella after hearing it.

 

So instead, she pressed, “You didn’t steal your ship then, like you told the barman.”

 

“No, the Flying Dutchman comes with the curse. The heart, the ship, the infamous name, it’s a packaged deal.” Stella quickened her pace as rain began to fall in the thick, heavy droplets that only accompany the fiercest gales. The once-distant thunder cracked and rolled overhead, and Scully’s hat only kept her so dry.

 

“Then are you a pirate?” she demanded, pulling her hat tighter to keep the wind from carrying it away.

 

“Yes, I am a pirate, though I fall far from Philip Padgett’s sadistic breed of piracy.” For the first time since they’d left the comfort of the Blue Baron, Stella tilted her head to catch Scully’s eye. “You ask a lot of questions, Dana Scully. When we raise anchor and break out of this storm, I expect you to answer some of mine.”

 

A sudden gust of wind nearly swept Scully off her feet, and she gripped Stella’s shoulder for balance. Lightning forked like the tongue of a sea serpent over the bay, lighting up the entire port before them for a brief second. It was enough time for Scully to take in the nearly empty docks, and she realized that only one tiny ship was still anchored that did not belong to the Royal Navy. Everyone else must have left in a hurry to escape the Dutchman, which Scully noted was nowhere in sight.

 

“You don’t see the Flying Dutchman,” said Stella beside her. “No worries. It comes only when called.”

 

“You should call it then,” Scully huffed, jogging slightly to match Stella’s pace. She wasn’t much shorter than Stella, but the other woman’s stride seemed unnaturally brisk. “I see lightning and unnerving waves and a dock I’ve no desire to be standing on when the brunt of the storm hits.”

 

The patter of rain turned to a steady pour, seeping through Scully’s clothes and rolling down her back. She shivered and drew her oversized coat tighter. As they approached the docks, pot-bellied old man raced the other direction holding his hat to his head, a bottle of rum in his hand. “Fools!” He shouted as he passed them. “The Dutchman is raising Hell upon us! Flee the port!”

 

A weary sigh escaped Stella’s lips. “I swear, for every misfortune that befalls these men, I am to blame. Downed by the ghastly Dutchman, drowned in Davy Jones’ locker, there are a hundred ways to die in these waters, and somehow they’ve all been attributed to me.”

 

Scully couldn’t help it. She stifled a snorting laugh as two more men ran from the port and back to Los Barriles. A lightning strike in the bay illuminated Stella’s harsh silhouette, and Scully laughed harder, wiping spatters of rain from her eyes. Men running for their lives, citing the deathly name of Scully’s new travelling companion, the drama of their departure from the Blue Baron, Stella’s less than noteworthy complaints in lieu of deaths, frenzies, and mobs. The used bullets in her pocket, clinking together as she walked. Another bark of laughter escaped her, and Stella’s lips twitched.

 

“We should hurry to the ship, find you some dry clothes” Stella said, but there was an amused glint in her eye. She raised her arm and turned to the owl. “Go on,” she urged, wobbling her shoulder until it took off and disappeared into the night.

 

Scully stopped to catch her breath. When she lifted her head, salt water stung her cheeks. She couldn’t tell whether she was choking on laughter or sobs, whether she was dazed or entertained or shattered by the last few hours. Likely all three. “I’m sorry,” she wheezed, “it’s such a strange night.”

 

Stella made no response, only placed a hand on the back of her soaked coat and gave her a gentle nudge forward. “Time is of the essence,” she said softly. “I only have so many seconds ashore.”

 

Scully nodded, still giggling, and again they picked up the pace until they stood at the end of Los Barriles’s only sturdy loading dock. Grey waves crashed against the pier, spraying bursts of salt and foam into their faces. Scully could see no ship on the horizon, save a small fishing boat anchored just down shore of them.

 

Scully wrinkled her eyebrows. “Is the Flying Dutchman invisible, as well?” she mumbled, only half joking.

 

“Wait here,” instructed Stella. As she glanced again at the moon her voice sounded like a too-taut violin string. “Hold this, please.” She passed Scully her coat and feathered hat, now soaked in the rain, and before Scully could utter a word of assent or protest, jumped into the water.

 

“Stella!” Scully shouted into the waves. "Are you mad!" One would have to be mad to swim in this weather. Or in Stella's case, she realized, nigh unkillable. She wrinkled her nose sourly, hugged her arms to her chest, and waited.

 

Stella’s head surfaced at the foot of the dock, her blonde hair plastered to her face beneath a red bandanna. The waves bubbled before her, like a witch’s cauldron, and Scully backed away from the end of the dock, her hand on her pistol. The ornate hull of a boat broke the surface, followed shortly by its body and a set of six oars. Water splashed out of the rowboat, and as it bobbed on the massive waves, a candle lit upon it hull, burning even through the rain.

 

Stella swam toward her and with some effort, climbed unceremoniously into the boat, which held itself upright and floated just beside the dock as if by magic. Or, Scully supposed, actually by magic. Stella held out her hand. “My belongings?” she requested briskly. “You look as though your hands are full.”

 

Scully handed her the hat and coat, which she rested in her lap. Then she held out her hand again. “Climb aboard.”

 

“What a majestic ship.” Scully took Stella’s hand and stepped into the wobbling boat. She froze as her knees shook in the uneven waves and only sat down in a moment of calm.

 

Stella fitted her hat firmly back over her head. “The Dutchman is not able to withstand such shallow waters.”  

 

“I know how ships work,” Scully muttered, her teeth chattering in the rain. This storm had brought with it a front of cold air, and soaked to the bone, Scully could hardly feel her fingertips. Stella looked unbothered, if a bit rosy from her impromptu swim. Seawater pooled at the pirate’s feet, sloshing around the dinghy as the rain collected, and sealed to her like a sleek second skin, her thin shirt revealed angular shoulders and toned muscle.

 

“Do you now?” Stella inquired slyly. She pointed to the bucket. “Empty the water.”

 

Assuming the order was directed to her, Scully cocked her eyebrow and crossed her arms, opened her mouth for a retort, but to her shock, the bucket filled itself and began dumping rainwater over the side. “Thank you,” said Stella. “Now, to the Dutchman.”

 

The six oars at their sides began to row, propelling them out to sea with the force of twenty men. Scully put her head in her hands, squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could manage, tried to drown out the sounds of thunder and creaking wood and oars rowing themselves through the rough water. Was she dreaming? Had she fallen asleep in the carriage on her way to Los Barriles and her imagination run wild whilst she dozed?

 

A wave broke over her head, soaking her face once more. She shook off her hair and collected herself. If she were being honest—and this concerned her even more than the supernatural forces surrounding her—she didn’t _want_ this to be a dream.

 

As the dock disappeared from sight, and only the lights of Los Barriles indicated their bearings, Scully heard a rush beneath them like a river current in spring. “What is that?”

 

Stella shot her a wan smile. “That, Miss Scully, is the Flying Dutchman.”

 

A ship erupted grandly from the ocean as if putting on a show, its sails opening and ropes reaching for their dinghy to bring it in. Their rowboat was pulled toward the massive ship, and as it slowly lifted them aboard, Scully took a long look at the notorious Flying Dutchman now looming over her. Its sails glowed an eerie silver in the fog, and just as the barman had told her, countless crabs and barnacles clung to the auburn wood of its flanks. Coral sprouted just below one porthole and seaweed hung like a curtain over another. Carved into the hull, a wooden woman poised her sword and shield for war.

 

“Hoist the colors!” Stella called aboard, and Scully watched, awestruck, as the skull and crossbones raised itself until it flapped desperately in a merciless wind, just above the crow’s nest. A white dot appeared on the front sail, and Scully realized it was Stella’s owl perched comfortably, waiting for its companion.

 

Stella climbed aboard the ship first, then reached a hand down for Scully to follow. “Welcome aboard.”

 

She took Stella’s freezing hand and stepped onto the deck of the Flying Dutchman. To her surprise, it was completely dry, stable, and freshly polished to boot. The ropes stored their lifeboat along the ship’s starboard flank, draining it of any remaining rainwater. Scully heard a resounding creak as the ship’s wheel spun them Northbound, and three more sails opened above her head. Her mouth hung open, her eyes following the interactions of the Dutchman with itself like a stranger overhearing the conversations of long time friends.

 

“Let’s get you warm,” said Stella, guiding Scully off the deck as sea spray splattered the rails. She tossed her coat over her shoulder, then pointed to the wheel. “Set course for Triton’s Arch. Bear the weather;  make detours if you must. Don't duck beneath the surface with Miss Scully here on board.” She pointed to the sails. “Be efficient,” then tapped the deck with her boot. “Don’t fire without my permission. Fetch me if there’s any trouble.”

 

She strode toward the Captain’s cabin just below the upper deck and beckoned for Scully to follow. Hesitantly, Scully ducked beneath the stairwell and into the cabin to find candles alight wherever Stella stepped and a young fire crackling in a surprisingly warm hearth. A massive, empty dining table took up the center of the room. She saw Stella’s coat laid out by the fire and followed suit with her own.

 

Before Scully could say a word, Stella stripped off her pistol and holster, sword and scabbard, and finally her wet shirt. Scully’s mouth fell open—she was not so much scandalized as taken by surprise; innocence and modesty were the most desirable, womanly traits back home, and Stella Gibson’s muscular back possessed neither. In fact, she found she liked that about Stella—how she casually flouted society’s bounds without a moment’s thought. She supposed pirates did not have the same overblown sense of propriety and self-denial as upstanding citizens, and she was coming to appreciate it.

 

When Stella turned around, Scully averted her eyes nearly on instinct, then lowered her hand slowly as Stella casually spread their clothes before the hearth and placed her pistol on the table. Stella was unembarrassed, Scully realized, so why should she be? Beneath the garments, they were all just skin and bone and battle scars. Still, she did her best not to stare. Not only was Stella uncommonly beautiful, but in the orange candlelight, old scars made themselves visible on Stella’s torso like ancient runes in the process of fading forever. Bullet holes in one side and out the other, what looked to be stab wounds from various swords, the distinctive line of a tenacious jellyfish running along her side. How many scenes like the Blue Baron had she walked out of unscathed?

 

“It looks tough, doesn’t it?” Stella shot her a half-smile, and Scully couldn’t tell whether it was proud or bitter.

 

“Yes,” Scully said. “How many times have you been struck with such a blow as to kill a man?”

 

“I don’t count when I can hardly feel it,” replied Stella. “Over time, the wounds fade to scars; the scars fade to nothing. I only get one day ashore every ten years. My deeds and presence rarely make men happy, and... well, you saw what I did at the Blue Baron.” She shrugged ever so slightly. "Pirate's life."

 

Scully wondered if Stella was the hero of those stories, or the villain, or both. “Was today your one day ashore, then?”

 

“It was.” Stella disappeared through a small door in the back of the room.

 

“I’m sorry then,” Scully called, “that your evening was interrupted.”

 

Stella reappeared carrying a slip, which she handed to Scully.

 

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Before tonight, it's been quite a dull time. It’s a rarity to have the company of a living soul aboard the Dutchman, even rarer that such company is welcome.” It would be _horribly_ dull to be here alone for ten years—seeing the ship come to life, it occurred to Scully only now what the barman had meant when he said 'in the company of only the dead.' Stella had no crew beyond the ghost-manned ship itself.

 

Stella pulled a dry shirt over her head, and the scar on her chest disappeared once more. Once more, she looked alive, young, fully human. “To be honest, I was surprised you came," she said with a wry smile. “Few young pirates have courage to board the ship of Davy Jones. We're a superstitious lot, after all.”

 

Scully pulled the slip over her head. “Thank you, but I’m not a pirate. My father was a Lieutenant in Royal Navy.”

 

“So was mine,” said Stella with an air of finality to the subject. “Doesn’t change what I am.” She sat down at the head of the dining table, and setting her extravagant hat firmly back on her head, tapped the wall of the cabin. “A meal for two, if you will?” she asked the ship politely. She turned to Scully. "The kitchen will be a little while."

 

The ship rocked in a particularly large wave, winds howling outside their cabin. A crack of lightning lit up the window, and thunder clapped over them like a monster rearing for battle. Inside, candles flickered but did not go out.


	4. Where the Sky Meets the Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another familiar face enters the scene...

At first, it felt as though time was dragging its feet. Scully woke each morning at the crack of dawn to the sound of wood creaking and the deck scrubbing itself of salt. She lay awake long into the nights, sometimes emerging from her cabin after dark to watch the stars pass her by. One such night, she stood at the bow of the ship; behind her, the steering wheel turned lazily, as if it would rather be asleep. Pale fish swarmed beneath, picking a glowing green substance off the bottom of the ship that Scully could only assume was some odd plant the Dutchman had picked up in waters far from her own. She squinted at the horizon and tried to pick out any speck that might be the ship they searched for, imagining Mulder in the brig, trying unsuccessfully to pick the lock of his jail cell with a piece of coral. Even worse, she imagined him chained to a smooth, ornately carved wooden table, surrounded by maps, a sour-looking pirate captain with a scraggly silver beard hovering over his shoulder and waiting for him to lead the way to Stella’s heart. She always forgot, when fear for Mulder overcame her, that the Stella was as pressed for time as she was, racing the Claudius to her physical beating heart. Remembering made her stomach turn.

 

She noticed the owl before she noticed Stella. It perched on the railing and greeted her with a soft coo. She had become accustomed to its presence; it slept atop the mast from dawn til dusk, then flitted peacefully about the ship. She’d seen it catch a fish once; Stella had told her it, too, had adjusted to the open ocean.

 

“Never gets old,” said a wistful voice behind her, and she turned to find Stella, clad in a white linen shirt and loose breeches, standing behind her. In the moonlight, she looked almost translucent, pale face and blonde hair fading into the grey of her ship. “I'll never tire of the horizon.” She stepped up to the helm and traced stars with her eyes—constellations twinkling above them and reflected in the rippling ocean below. “That’s why I’m here.”

 

Scully didn’t ask what she meant—why she had chosen the Dutchman, or why she hadn’t abandoned it after however long she’d spent aboard. It frightened Scully sometimes, that Stella could be ageless, how little she knew of Stella’s life—not even when she had lived it.

 

Stella placed her hand on the wheel. “Sometimes I spin it to feel as though I’m in control of my destiny.”

 

“You can sail wherever you want,” Scully pointed out. It was more than she could say for her own life, if she ever returned to it.

 

“But I can never go ashore. I can reach any port without capsizing; I can walk along any beach I please as long as I stay in the waves. I have seen the most rugged of mountains and the greenest of rainforests. I have seen oceans of sand and countries of ice, but I cannot explore them. I have all the freedom in the world, but for that.” Her fingernails drummed on the wheel. “I may only have the horizon, but the horizon I have forever.”

 

* * *

 

After that night, Scully forgot the date. She measured hours only by the sun beating on her face and days by the tanning of her shoulders and the pink of her cheeks and chin, where her hat could not quite protect her at midday. A couple weeks passed, she presumed, as the rock of the ship on windy days ceased to unnerve her, and when she walked barefoot on the deck her feet no longer blistered or picked up splinters of damp wood. She began to sleep soundly on calm nights, but still, when clouds hid the moon, and the horizon roiled, and she could hear heavy waves slap against the wall of her quarters, she would go on deck and cling to the netted shrouds and watch lightning reach for the sea and the sea reach back.

 

Stella would always join her, and she never questioned the pirate’s company. They kept to themselves during the day, they dined together in Stella’s cabin, stood together on the deck during storms, passed long hours on the open ocean, and they hardly spoke. Scully had come to realize Stella spoke everything deliberately; she only conversed when she felt something needed to be said. Otherwise, she let the ship guide itself on the course she had set.

 

* * *

 

Scully eyed the cliff that rose perhaps ten meters from the Dutchman. She looked down at her shirt—it was her brother’s shirt and thin trousers she’d worn in Los Barriles. She looked apprehensively back up at the cliff. When she was three years old, she had nearly drowned in the freezing waters of the English channel, just beneath a wall of dark rock. At five, she had learned to swim beneath sheer white cliffs in the warm bay of Port Washington. Wobbling on the plank, of all places, the waters beneath her feet reminded her of home, and she couldn’t decide whether she liked that or not. But the sun was unusually scorching that morning, and she could see no other solution to the heat piercing her down to her bones. In this heat, it was a wonder she hadn’t been baked to nothing _but_ bones. The once-cold spring water she had collected at a small port the day before was hardly a relief.

 

Scully disliked having no proper shore in sight, but she considered herself a strong swimmer. Not to mention, were she to find herself caught in an unexpected current, the Dutchman would catch her faster than any human crew could. It wasn’t as though she feared she might drown; no, she simply disliked diving off a moving ship into water she could not see the end of. This newfound uncertainty caught her off guard. It occurred to her for the first time, that she had no idea what monstrous creatures lurked in the depths of the sea.

 

She bounced a little on the plank and lifted her arms to dive.

 

“Fuck! We have a tail.”

 

She froze as Stella’s harsh curse carried from the bow. “We’re being chased?”

 

Stella lifted a scope to her eye. “So it seems,” she called. She lowered the scope and met Scully’s eyes. “Best not to go for a swim at the moment.”

 

“Who in God’s name would chase the Flying Dutchman?”

 

“No one who knows its the Dutchman.” Stella put her hands on her hips. “You being the exception.

 

Scully stepped off the plank and looked out behind them. Sure enough, a massive ship followed in their wake, pointing toward the same horizon as their own. “Does this happen often?”

 

“I don’t often sail above the surface on a clear day. The Dutchman is much quicker underwater.”

 

“Could Mulder be on board that ship?”

 

Stella took another look in her spyglass. “It’s certainly not the Claudius,” she said. “We won’t catch up to it for at least a week.” She slipped the spyglass back into her belt and opened up her pistol. “I need more bullets. Do you?”

 

Scully nodded. “I’ve been three short since the Blue Baron.”

 

Stella passed her the spyglass. “Keep a weather eye on our tail. I’m preparing for the worst.” She secured her hip holster and stalked toward the captain’s cabin. She pointed to the hatch below deck. “Guns at the ready! Full canvas; the wind’s with us today. Try to lose them if we can.”

 

Scully put the scope to her eye. The ship looked as though it belonged to the British Navy, with clean white sails and cleanly painted flanks broken by two rows of cannons. She noted the Union Jack flying upon the main mast, but below it the Jolly Rodger fluttered in a building wind. Privateers—and to her horror, they seemed to be gaining. Realistically, Scully knew the Dutchman could be neither sunk nor captured, but as the only mortal thing aboard, she _could_ be.

 

“They’re getting closer!” Scully called as Stella emerged from the cabin carrying a handful of bullets and a cutlass in a sling. She pressed three bullets into Scully’s open palm, which Scully quickly loaded into her pistol.

 

“Those’ve not yet been lodged in me,” Stella said with a humorless smile, then passed her the cutlass. “You said you knew how to handle a sword?”

 

Scully nearly dropped it as she took the handle. It was thicker, wider, and heavier than the rapiers with which her father had taught her swordplay. But she told Stella, "yes" and strapped the holstered cutlass over her shoulder. It would do in a scrap.

 

It wasn’t long before the ship had nearly pulled up beside them, within range of their cannons. “I know that crew,” Stella muttered to Scully's surprise, drawing her pistol. She fired a warning shot at the bow sprit. Scully closed her left eye and peeked through her right, waited for the sound of cannon fire and splitting wood. The privateer crew only tied up a sail to slow themselves, keeping alongside the Dutchman. The gap between the two ships was now slim enough to swing across.

 

“Be on your way or we’ll blow you into the water!” Stella shouted, clinging with one hand to the webbing, her pistol raised in the other. “Davy Jones’s Locker will collect your souls!”

 

Scully snorted. Davy Jones sounded far more spectacular and ominous than Stella Gibson, though she had found Stella Gibson to carry many a foreboding mystery of her own. Truly, she didn’t know what she’d do if it came to blowing a privateer’s ship into the water. She hadn’t considered coming into conflict with the British Crown for she certainly didn’t consider herself a pirate, and she had no desire to kill a man (although she liked to think she’d do it, if her own life was on the line, and suspected she’d have to eventually).

 

A dark-haired, sea-weathered man in a tricorner hat emerged from the buccaneer crew. He wore a deep blue captain’s uniform, though his peg leg and disheveled open coat suggested he was more pirate than king’s man. From her vantage point on the Dutchman, Scully noted white seeping into his beard and worry lines settling above permanently forlorn eyebrows. “Stella!” he called across the gap, and Scully pursed her lips. How did Stella know this man? Was he friend or foe? If nothing else, he'd not yet fired on them. “Stella, hold your fire!” Stella said nothing, and the captain turned to his men. “Hold your own fire,” he ordered brusquely.

 

“Captain Burns, the Crown must be serving you well!” Stella shouted, gun still in hand. “I see you’ve a new ship!" 

 

“As do you! Might I come aboard?" the captain shouted back. "We would like to offer you a bargain to end any hostilities that might otherwise take place!”

 

“You were a pirate last I saw you, Captain Burns! Have you forgotten how to stave off a battle?"

 

"I'm an honorable man seeking an audience with you for both our benefit!"

 

"Perhaps," Stella called, "but I'm still a pirate!"

 

Captain Burns sighed heavily. “All right, Stella! Parlay! I demand parlay.”

 

Stella gestured expansively to the Dutchman. “Come aboard, then!”

 

The captain tossed a hook and rope over the railing of the Dutchman and climbed onto the deck. He was adept at dealing with his peg leg, Scully would give him that.  

 

Burns turned to Scully. “Who are you?”

 

“Scully,” was all she said. 

 

Seeming satisfied, he glanced about the ship. “Where’s the rest of your crew?”

 

“Busy,” Stella said and ducked into the captain’s cabin. Burns opened his mouth as if to protest, furrowed his brow suspiciously, then changed his mind. He gave one last look to the wheel before disappearing behind Stella.

 

Scully crept up to the door and pressed her ear against it—if her quest was at stake, she wanted to know. Clearly Captain Burns’s arrival was unexpected, his call for parlay even more so.

 

“I didn’t know this ship was yours until I heard you threaten to sink me,” Burns’s voice, tinged with something akin to hurt, resonated clearly through the cabin door.

 

“You did chase down our ship like a huntsman,” Stella said in a business-like tone, and Scully could picture her clasping her hands together and resting them on the table, sizing up Burns with the cold blue gaze of Davy Jones, her thoughts tucked safely away. “My threat was not unjustified.” A pause. “Nor was it empty.”

 

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Burns with a chuckle. “But nonetheless, I’d like to make you the same offer I make to every pirate vessel I encounter. Sail for England, receive a full pardon from the king, and reap your rewards.”

 

“You’re wasting your own time, Burns.”

 

“Stella, what happened to the Ophelia?” Burns pressed.

 

“I replaced it.”

 

“You mean you lost it. You wouldn’t have left the Ophelia and its crew unless it sank or it was captured—a captain and his ship are inseparable until one of them dies.”

 

“How true.”

 

“I can promise you’ll never lose a ship again, Stella. You just have to join beneath the Crown, as I have. Look,” he implored, and Scully heard a clunk. “A French privateer took my ship _,_ my leg, the lives of my men. You remember Jimmy Olson, my first mate aboard the Beatrice after you left? He died in battle; sword went right through the middle of him.”

 

Scully heard a weary sigh. “Pirate’s life,” she said quietly, with sorrow and respect. That, Scully had come to realize, was how she honored the dead. She couldn’t bring herself to do so any other way.

 

“That’s all you have to say?”

 

“Jim, we rob for a living. We capture vessels and amass treasure. We bury and hoard and spend; we’re not noble, but we are free. The best we can do is honor that.”

 

“Don’t you ever feel remorse, though, firing upon the vessels of your motherland? I’m asking you to take an oath to the Crown, sacrificing only your freedom to sink a British ship at will. You’d be a pirate but under the protection of the Navy.”

 

“The motherland has never shown me respect,” Stella said icily. “I will make no such alliance.” Scully swore her voice dropped half an octave, bore the same dangerous ring as it had when she’d threatened John Jack, and she stiffened at the door. Stella continued, “I would advise you, Captain Burns, to go easier on the rum.”

 

“Stella, for God’s sake I am trying to keep you safe! I care for you. When you left the Beatrice I would have come after you in a heartbeat. I would have left my crew to their own capable hands sailed with you until death. I could have protected the Ophelia; you and your crew would never have been forced to find a new ship.” The rustle of papers, awkward clumping on the floor, the thump of a body against the wall. A harsh smack filled the air, followed by a thick, dank silence. That was the final thread for Scully; she would not stand outside in ignorance. She kicked opened the cabin door and stopped in the doorway, as if struck by lightning, at the sight before her: Burns hunched over, clutching his now swollen nose. Stella stood against the wall, watching him, one hand balled into a fist and the other wrapped around her pistol. She looked every inch a terrifying scourge of the seas. Her hair was tangled, her hat askew, and her face a worn map of fury.

 

“Stella,” Burns pleased hoarsely, “I’m simply asking you for peace. You would have the HMS Helena—myself and my crew—as your sister ship, if you ever found yourself in trouble.”

 

Stella lifted her proud chin and set her jaw. “The Flying Dutchman needs no sister ship,” she said imperiously. “This parlay is over. My crew will see you off, unless you want a bullet in your chest.” A chair slid over to Burns and pushed him toward the cabin door. Stella swept out the door, and Scully moved to follow.

 

“D’you want to know where the Claudius is?” Burns called after her, his face ruddy and unnerved and full of desperation.

 

Stella froze in her tracks. “I’m following it.”

 

Burns’s cracked lips split into a tiny smile nearly hidden by his beard. “It’s you Spector wants, isn’t it? When he said in Tortuga he wanted the treasure of Davy Jones, I never suspected it’d be _your_ heart he was after. He’s nearing the island, Stella; he has a navigator aboard who knows every myth and treasure these waters have to offer. He has the knife.”

 

“I know that,” Stella snapped. “He ripped it from ‘round my very neck.”

 

“All he needs is to know where you buried it. Stella, you cannot touch dry land. You need help if you’re to protect your precious heart from Spector. You’ve made mistakes, and now you can’t correct them on your own. My crew can go ashore, walk the beaches like your curse forbids.”

 

Stella glowered at him. “I need no living man to guard my heart. Scully can go ashore if need be, but I assure you, the Dutchman will destroy anything in its path. Paul Spector will pay for his deeds by the sword and the cannon.”

 

A flicker of admiration crossed Burns’s eyes. “You’re just, for a pirate.”

 

“A good pirate knows when to be.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Now get off my ship before I send yours to the bottom of the ocean.”

 

Burns met Scully’s eyes over Stella’s shoulder. "Never before have I been aboard the Flying Dutchman. But I’ve seen it, and I’ve heard terrible music grind from its belly: Davy Jones’s organ, singing the deaths of a hundred drowned sailors in a burning wreck.” With a grunt, he stood up straight and ambled unevenly to the deck. His peg leg knocked hollowly against the wood.

 

When Burns had returned to his ship and abandoned its course, their vessel but a spot against the setting sun, Scully couldn’t help but ask: “Was it really your intention all along to send me ashore to do that work you couldn’t?” It wasn’t an accusation—it was the type bargain she had expected when she told the carriage driver to take her to Los Barriles. Still she couldn’t help but feel a bit hurt.

 

For the first time since she’d boarded the Dutchman, Scully realized how little she knew of the woman before her, how much longer she had been Stella Gibson than Davy Jones. Stella had known Jim Burns when he was a young man with two legs, known the Jimmy Olson who died on the Beatrice, captained a ship called the Ophelia and left it behind for a curse. Scully wondered how much of the Stella she’d met in Los Barriles had come to be since she had become captain of the Dutchman and how much of Stella—her world-weary wit, her contentment with herself—had been quintessentially hers since youth.

 

“Only if you would do it,” Stella replied, her feet propped up on the table in her cabin. Suddenly, she looked so much older, so much more exhausted. The circles beneath her eyes and hollow beneath her cheeks caught shadows as if they’d been carved with a silver spoon. She twisted a compass in her fingers, turning it slowly around its fixed needle. “I’d not force such a risk upon you, but the thought crossed my mind.” She tilted her chin to meet Scully’s gaze. “You were bold and altruistic when I saw you in the tavern, and seeing how far you’d go to rescue your friend, I thought you might help me at your own will.”

 

“I would.”

 

If the answer startled her, Stella did not show it. She ran her fingers through her hair and tugged them free of a tangle. After a dragging silence, she said, “I promise you the organ Burns mentioned is not a sick celebration of the drowned, as he made it out to be."

 

"I never made the assumption," Scully replied.

 

"The organ plays whenever we go to battle or pass a wreck. Philip Padgett played it as his adversaries burned and sank. Now, it is the Dutchman’s tribute to those ghouls and spirits it cannot join. The souls that man this ship are as cursed as I am, Miss Scully. They cannot join their loved ones in the next life, and those survivors who hear the organ of Davy Jones know they are soon to die.”

 

It sounded grand and terrible. It left her curious.

 

* * *

 

It was in the midst of a particularly nasty gale that Stella showed her the organ. It was obvious the captain hadn’t slept—she was still in her coat and hat, still hard and full of controlled energy, moving like a coiled spring about the ship.

 

“Do you know how to play?” Scully asked, sizing up the spectacular instrument before her. It was a musical beast, with valves and pipes stacking up against the wall of what would be an officer’s cabin.

 

She shook her head. “I’ve no teacher, nor the patience to teach myself. I hardly ever  _ask_ it to play. When I do, it's louder than a hurricane.” She ran her fingers over the faded keys and turned to Scully, cocking her eyebrow. “Would you like to hear? Unless you intend to go back to sleep—which I doubt the weather will permit.”

 

“I would like that very much.”

 

Stella led her to the deck. “It only knows a couple songs,” she confessed, “but you’ve not tired of them like I have.” She glanced back at the cabin where the organ was tucked away. “Play us a song,” she ordered.

 

Scully could hardly hear it at first—a soft, haunting tune nearly unfit for the tempest unfolding around them. To her surprise, Stella took her hand and her waist and led her in a slow waltz. “I hardly enjoyed dancing on land,” she said in lieu of an explanation, “but I learned well and appreciate the finesse now.”

 

Scully didn’t reply, only allowed herself to be stepped in time to the ship’s slow rock. The dance was contained, simple, and Stella’s sharp blue eyes never left hers. Scully had learned to dance as a young child, but she’d avoided it in recent years. It had never seemed a pastime worth engaging in. It had too many rules; it was too strained.

 

Then the organ took off, ringing and echoing across the ship, breaking thunder with a ghostly rumble in a minor key, and suddenly Stella swung her faster and wilder about the deck, spun her, led a dance with a purpose. It was the type of song her piano teacher would have been scandalized to hear her play, but the type of song with a story behind it ten-year-old Scully would have longed to hear. Her father would have appreciated its fateful tune. And the waltz was one that didn’t happen in ballrooms, that made her all too aware of the rain sticking to her shoulders and the lightning overhead. This was a pirate’s dance, limitless, death-heralding, and she loved it.

 

Stella spun her again beneath one rain-soaked arm, and she decided on a dime she wanted to lead this time. She wanted to see Stella’s coattails twirl like a ballerina’s slip beneath her hand. So she pushed the cold hands backwards and the wet, lean waist to her other side and led Stella—who moved without protest—about the floorboards like she’d always watched the little boys do during her lessons.

 

She spun Stella, and the pirate’s black coattails whipped in a wide circle, splattering Scully’s face. And then Stella was close again, and for the first time she looked to the negligible space between them and saw a deeply cut shirt and three white bullet holes. Two breasts neither fettered nor corseted, one red, jagged scar where Stella had cut out her own heart and put it in a box and buried it on some godforsaken island.

 

And she let go. Stella in her pirate’s coat, turning on the toe of her boot—that was all she’d wanted to see. She’d already seen her scars, her open chest, but she felt as though she had seen much more.

 

They fell apart and Scully rested her hands on her knees, catching her breath as the rain beat down upon her, leaking through her hair and down her Roman nose. Stella simply stood, hands clasped behind her back. She had no breath to catch. “You dance like you were forced to learn how.”

 

“You dance like you regret learning how,” Scully retorted, leaning against the main mast.

 

“It’s only fun if you’re kept on your toes.”

 

Scully nodded breathlessly. “No shit,” she muttered, then huffed a laugh.

 

“And you curse like a Navy officer,” said Stella with a wan smirk. “Unexpectedly.”

 

Then she retreated to her cabin. When the red sun poked over a strip of thunderclouds, Scully was still standing at the bow, her fingers wrapped around a spoke of the wheel. She almost wanted to spin it, and see where it took her, but Mulder’s frightened face lurked in the forefront of her mind.

 

Stella slammed the cabin door as she emerged, and Scully turned around. “Careful not to fall in love with that horizon,” Stella said as dawn reached the crow’s nest. “It’ll turn you into a pirate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The organ was another twisted myth borrowed from Pirates of the Caribbean. If it wasn't obvious, I've been stealing legends, altering them, and applying them for my own purposes. The other night I was listening to the Davy Jones theme, and it occurred to me that in a different context, such a haunting song would be kind of a perfect dancing song (instead of a grisly tune played with a squid monster's tentacle beard). 
> 
> I took some creative liberties with Jim Burns (more specifically, Jim Burns's limbs), and I tried to portray what kind of pirate he would be in historical context. Of course, I've more or less thrown historical accuracy out the window at this point, but I imagine his chauvinistic side would be a bit more pronounced in the early 18th Century.


	5. Blood and Fortune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While replenishing resources in Tortuga, Scully encounters a few of Stella's former crew. The back story in this chapter will get grisly so if you are extremely sensitive to blood you should proceed with caution.

When they arrived at Tortuga, Stella ferried her in the rowboat until she could reach the dock. It was a far from ideal—the long-cursed pirate could not go ashore, and her living guest needed to replenish food and fresh water.

 

“You can find the markets next to the pub,” Stella explained. “It’s been a decade since I last saw that pub. I don’t remember it’s name, but you’ll know as soon as you spot it.”

 

Scully climbed onto the dock. When she turned around, Stella and the rowboat had disappeared, leaving only a spatter of bubbles at the ocean surface. In the distance, the Flying Dutchman decorated a fading horizon, its sails glowing silver in the moonlight. Ship of curses, ship of ghosts, ship of dreams.

 

By contrast, Tortuga was decidedly not Scully’s favorite port in the Caribbean. The docks smelled of dead fish and rotten salt, the streets of livestock and rum. It held all the grit of piracy with none of the intrigue, belonging to drunks and thieves washed up by unfavorable tides.

 

She stalked through the shadows of Tortuga wearing Stella's blouse and trousers. In Stella’s clothing, carrying Stella’s sword beside her pistol, she felt braver than she had in Los Barriles, and she couldn’t discern whether it was her garb or her weeks at sea that bolstered her confidence. When a stranger eyed her up, she stared coldly back at him—robbers couldn’t give her a fright if she frightened them first.

 

A troop of English soldiers hustled toward her, dragging a thick-bearded man in cuffs and a gag. Scully ducked into the nearest doorway. She’d hardly been familiar with every soldier in the Caribbean, she was a Navy man’s daughter. She had attended the balls, waved her father farewell on the docks and run to greet him as he disembarked his ship. She could hardly risk being recognized, different as she appeared from when she’d left Port Washington. They'd undoubtedly drag her home in disgrace, leave her jobless on the docks of Port Washington, without Mulder, without her pistol, and without the Flying Dutchman.

 

The soldiers passed, and Scully breathed a sigh of relief, leaning against the door. A man walked through the entryway, his hat striking the wooden sign above her head. It swung precariously, and Scully read the words “Davy Jones’s Locker” in misaligned script, the paint worn and chipped. She smirked and glanced inside. A young, russet haired woman handed pints of questionable beer out to ragged men. She looked worn, weathered, overworked, and tough enough to bear her burdens well. Scully scanned the tavern. It was rowdier than the Blue Baron, a feat Scully assumed would be hard to achieve. She looked again at the sign—this had to be pub Stella mentioned. The market would be only a few steps up the road.

 

As she turned to leave, a woman’s voice called, “Oi!” from inside the pub. Scully turned around. The barwoman stood facing her, hands on her hips. She wore practical trousers like Scully and a pistol strapped across her chest. Picking a fight had not been a part of the plan, and this woman seemed a more formidable opponent than most. Lifting her hands in the air, Scully backed toward the door.

 

“You, with the sword!” Scully met her eyes. “Yes, you! Come back here!”

 

Hesitantly, Scully weaved her way between tables, feeling every patron’s eyes on her back. When she reached the bar, she lifted her chin and asked as confidently as she could, “Yes?”

 

The woman crossed her arms impatiently. “I know that sword,” she said in a roughened Irish accent. "You steal it?”

 

“It was given to me.”

 

“Oh, really?” The barwoman raised her eyebrows. “That’s not a gift given lightly.”

 

“I’m a passenger aboard a smugglers’ vessel.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. “We encountered trouble, and I needed to defend myself.”

 

The woman didn’t look convinced. “Smugglers?” she challenged. “That sword belongs to the one and only Captain Stella Gibson, and her father before that. So I’ll ask you again—did you steal it?”

 

The woman knew of Stella. Odd—she hadn’t imagined that anyone knew of Stella, outside a couple of old wives’ tales. From her encounter with Burns, she’d gleaned that Stella had been force to be reckoned with long before she became captain of the Dutchman. But to Scully, she was more a legend than a tangible woman. She carried herself with a dangerous confidence and a swaggering step; she sailed to the tune of a funereal organ and danced like a ghost floating inches off the ground. She had never imagined Stella as a baby, a stubborn child, a young pirate woman like the barmaid standing before her.

 

That this woman so quickly came to Stella unconditional defense came as a surprise to Scully, given Stella's last meeting with an old acquaintance. She felt thoughtless. She sat down on a stool and rested her elbows on the bar, the young woman’s glare still boring into her.

 

“I didn’t steal the sword. Stella lent it to me for protection while I’m in her charge.” She hoped her words came as a promise.

 

To her dismay, the barmaid glare only sharpened. “You’re stubborn. Let me explain—" she snapped, "I don’t believe you because Stella Gibson died ten years ago, and today you turn up wearing her sword.” The woman looked her up and down once more. “And her clothes.”

 

 _She died?_ She ought not to pry, but the woman had piqued her curiosity. “How did she die, if I may ask?”

 

The woman pursed her lips. “By the hand of Philip Pagett. How else? Now I’ll ask you again—how did you come by that sword?”

 

“And I shall tell you, Miss—”

 

“Ferrington,” the barmaid snapped.

 

“Miss Ferrington. I swear by myfather’s grave Stella lent me this sword.” Scully had a sneaking suspicion Miss Ferrington knew more of Stella’s whereabouts than she let on, if she recognized the blade strapped to her waist. She leaned in dramatically. “Have you ever heard the story of Davy Jones? Captain of the Flying Dutchman, neither living nor dead, bound to the sea but for a single day every ten years. She spent that day in a Los Barriles inn, and by chance, I found myself searching that very inn for a proper pirate." She paused, trying unsuccessfully to read Ferrington's features. "I've been aboard the Dutchman ever since,” Scully finished matter-of-factly.

 

Then Ferrington breathed an audible sigh of relief. “You’re no bloodthirsty seeker of riches. I always feared one day a man would come in with Stella’s sword and hat and boast of finding Davy Jones’s heart.” Her eyes saddened as she told Scully, “I might not recognize Stella now, nor Stella me. But it was never unlike her to take in a woman unhappy with her station. What be your name?”

 

She straightened her father’s pistol over her hip. “Scully,” she said. Only Scully.

 

“And just how does a woman such as yourself wind up scouring Los Barriles in search of a pirate?” 

 

Scully crossed her arms. “If I’m to regale you with stories, I’ll need a pint.” The foul taste of Tortuga rum would keep her alert, if nothing else. For a woman her size, she held her liquor well.

 

“It’s Captain Ferrington, if you please,” she said hotly, passing Scully a pint of rum.

 

“Captain? How does a captain find herself serving spirits in a Tortuga tavern?”

 

Ferrington shrugged. “Bartender died in a scrum with some rogue fellows. We chased the bunch back to sea, but someone had to keep the rum flowing.”

 

Scully gagged at the first burning sip of run. “Horrid,” she choked. “I’ll make my tale brief. My friend has been taken hostage aboard the Claudius. When the officers in Port Washington refused to pursue his captors, I took matters into my own hands and scoured Los Barriles for a captain whom I could hire to rescue him. I found no one who would let a woman accompany them until Stella offered her services. You see, we share a foe. The Claudius’s captain has forcefully employed my friend's navigation skills to find Stella’s heart.”

 

Ferrington's eyes darkened. Bottle clutched tightly to her chest, she thumped weakly against the wall. “Spector’s back."

 

“You’ve heard of Spector?”

 

“Aye,” said Ferrington grimly. “We were docked in a thick fog outside London. It was the last night I saw Stella alive, but it'd been a fortnight since she'd left us when Spector boarded our ship, raped and murdered a woman seeking refuge with us. He caught us all unawares; when I tried to stop him escaping, he disarmed me. I thought I was bound for the locker, and then—the Flying Dutchman appeared, and at its helm stood none other than Stella Gibson herself." Ferrington shivered; her eyes had drifted far away. "She’d always been stern and tough, but at the helm of that ship, she looked as if the sea had seeped into her bones and carved her out like a cliff face.”

 

Scully imagined a younger Stella, without her bandanna, her feathered hat and swaying coattails; a Stella who danced to a fiddle instead of an organ. In her mind, Stella had always been grave and beautiful, but the Stella Scully knew had a strapping, rugged maturity despite (or perhaps due to) her immortality. She tried to picture the Stella with a scabbed, red wound across her chest, who tied the first bandanna and looked in the mirror and wondered how the sea had aged her immortal face in only a few weeks. This was Ferrington's Stella, who had just barely settled into Davy Jones when she shattered the white crests of London Sound.

 

“She challenged him to a duel, said she would dispense justice on behalf of the dead girl and fought him recklessly. He stabbed her, but of course he could not take her life. We all stared dumbly at her—the we'd had no idea of her curse—as she stood before Spector in the very shirt you’re wearing, and we saw the sword sticking out her back like a cooking spit. She could have shot him, you know, but she believed in duels of justice by the pirate code. She bound him and named him prisoner in my charge, but as soon as the Dutchman sank back to its watery depths, he wriggled free and fled to the Claudius." She gritted her teeth, clearly blaming herself for Spector's escape.

 

“He swore revenge upon Stella for sticking him though; she swore revenge upon him for taking that poor woman’s life aboard her ship.” Ferrington raised her mug in Scully’s direction. “The ocean's only got room for one of them. Pray it’s Stella.”

 

“ _Her_ ship?” Scully took a gulp from her pint, drowning the rowdy voices around them. Stella was an incredibly private person, and she shared more fairy tales than truths as to her past. Nearly all Scully knew of her had come from Jim Burns.

 

“Aye. She was my captain aboard the Ophelia. A bedraggled bunch we were too, and now the Ophelia’s mine. Say, Scully,” Dani said hopefully, “What say you to bringing me crew some peace of mind? We’ve not heard from Stella Gibson in ten years, but for old sailors hobbling into Tortuga claiming they spotted the Dutchman.”

 

Scully nodded hesitantly—did she _want_ to meet Stella’s old crew? Did she want them to know her name? Reservations aside, she was curious who her companion had traveled with in the past, who she had been before she had all the time in the world. That was the truest test of character, after all—how one used what little time they possessed.

 

Ferrington put two fingers in her mouth and whistled so loud the quarreling trio in the back of the bar fell silent as the grave. “Tom, join me at the bar!” she called sharply, and a curly-haired man wearing a grey vest and and dagger atop his shirt raised his head from a center table.

 

“Aye, Captain!” he called, picking up a pint and picking his way between crooked tables with a wicked smile . He sat down beside Scully and ran his hand over the uneven stubble on his cheeks. “What’s the news on repairs? We be ready to leave port by the month’s end?”

 

“Perhaps,” said Ferrington, “but that’s not the matter. Scully, meet my first mate Tom Anderson.”

 

He tipped an invisible hat in her direction. “Pleasure.” His eye were charming; his wry grin could mislead a trusting soul, were it anything but utterly genuine. Scully liked him, thus far. He glanced at the sword on her belt, and his eyebrows shot up. “Could’ve sword I saw that blade before.”

  
“Scully is sailing with Stella Gibson.”

 

“Good god!” he cried gaily, “You’ve seen Captain Gibson! We haven’t heard from her in ten odd years.”

 

“Her first day ashore was only a few weeks past,” said Ferrington. “Ten years at sea, one day on land.”

 

“It has been ten years, hasn't it? God Dani, I remember the night she left us like it was only yesterday.” He turned to Scully. “You’ve been traveling in the Flying Dutchman, then?”

 

Scully nodded.

 

“What a ship!” he exclaimed, thumping his empty pint on the table. He lowered his voice, as if passing a secret. “How is she, after all this time?”

 

“I hardly know her,” Scully admitted.

 

“She’s very private,” said Dani, leaning against the bar. “She’s ashamed of no secrets, but keeping to herself was always Stella’s way of staying master of her fate. Perhaps more so now that her fate is decided.”

 

Scully couldn’t help but ask what she had wondered since John Jack put three bullets in Stella’s chest. “How did it happen? She doesn’t strike me as a woman who’d seek out curses. She hardly strikes me as a woman who would _believe_ in one, if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.”

 

“It’s not a happy tale,” Tom warned her, “and if she hasn’t told you, she doesn’t intend for you to hear.”

 

Scully lifted her chin. The night she’d met Stella, she'd decided she didn't want to know what Stella had done to earn such a curse. Part of her still wanted nothing to do with that Stella’s old mates had to say. But her will had strengthened, or perhaps curiosity had gotten the best of her—it always did; she shared an insatiable curiosity with Mulder, despite their innumerable differences, and it had saved them often enough that she knew not to fight it.

 

 _Mulder._ There was the anxious itch again, lingering in the back of her mind. Some nights she felt as though she had all the time in the world to find him; other nights she laid awake in her cabin, begging the ship to sail faster lest he die before she reach him. Tonight she had little choice—the food and ale of Tortuga beckoned, and a strong headwind had kept the Dutchman nearly at a standstill for hours before it made port. Tonight she had time for pirates’ tales.

 

“Better to hear it from her shipmate than her enemy,” Scully said with a decisive nod.

 

“Very well,” replied Dani, sliding two pints of rum down the bar for a band of weary newcomers.

 

Tom relaxed in his chair. “I met Stella when she was first mate aboard the Beatrice. She worked us hard, but she worked herself harder. I admit I was a little taken with her when I first joined the crew,” he chuckled to himself, “but she had my instant respect and after some time at sea, by deepest loyalties. She’s got that power the best captains have, to make you want to stick with her. It’s how she carries herself, y'see. In a single moment, she seems both like she feels nothing and like she bears all the love and hurt in the world.””

 

 _The Beatrice,_  recalled Scully.Stella must have been Jim Burns’s first mate.

 

“We were attacked by the Ophelia—another ship of buccaneers—and by Stella and Burns’s planning won the battle with almost no damage to either ship. Captain Burns offered her the Ophelia as reward for her service—I think he hoped she might sail it by the Beatrice’s side—and those of us who wanted Stella Gibson as our captain left with her during the night. By dawn, the Beatrice was behind our horizon.”

 

Beside him, Dani finished the last of her drink and took up the tale. “I joined the crew while Stella was docked in Port Royale. I awaited hanging on charges of sodomy and piracy, though as I see it, the two go hand in hand."

 

"They do?" interrupted Scully. 

 

Dani grimaced. “It’s a crime to love a woman by the laws of England, but not in the Pirate’s code. I'll neither marry nor live in peace, but a pirate’s life serves me well. We may be plunderers, but we fight for ourselves and take our booty as payment for our trouble. We’re all miscreants here; what’s one more law?” The look in her eyes dared Scully to condemn her, and by her Catholic upbringing, a younger Scully might have done just that.

 

Working with Mulder had changed her. She had unlocked her power to question. Sunset after sunset, they had stood on the cliff banks overlooking the bay and watched ships come and go and wondered as to the sailors’ fates. Her God had changed from a court justice—the God of her youth—to a maelstrom that gave and took at random. Once, she had belonged to her faith; now her faith belonged to her. She opposed looting England's bounty, of course, but she'd never been sentenced to hanging either. She met Captain Ferrington’s eyes evenly, and the young woman calmed. Ferrington had likely suffered too many of these uncertain moments, wondering whether her trusted comrade would turn on her in the name of the law and the Church. She faced the moment with a stoicism not unlike Stella Gibson’s, and Scully wondered how many similar moments Stella had faced herself.

 

“I was only hours from the noose when a woman in a guard’s uniform sprung me from prison and offered me a place on her ship. I took it, of course; that or hang. It was the simplest and best choice I've ever made. I couldn't say exactly how long I spent on the Ophelia before we returned to London; time passes strangely in open water. But one day, the Flying Dutchman broke the waves beside us, and we thought we were all doomed to Davy Jones’s locker. Then Captain Padgett—” Dani shivered as she spoke the cursed name—” demanded parlay, conferred with Stella, and sank back below the waves, leaving us to catch our breath. The the next morning, Stella said we were sailing to London.

 

"I found out later Stella’s father owed a debt to Philip Padgett. He’d been shipwrecked while a Navy Commodore, just before Stella was born. In order that he survive to meet his daughter, he struck a bargain with Padgett—when Padgett saw fit, he would take his place as captain of the Dutchman. The Commodore sailed home with Davy Jones's chest and kept it beneath his bed until inevitably, Padgett could no longer live with his curse. He gave Stella the knife with which he cut out his heart, to bring to her father in London so he could fulfill his end of the deal.

 

“We docked a few knots east of London, and Stella went ashore to visit her father. To our surprise, she returned still bearing the knife and chest. We thought her father'd given them to her for safe-keeping but didn't get a chance to ask. She locked herself in the cabin all night, and the next morning, we found her at the prow of the ship, with Padgett's chest beside her and the knife around her neck.

 

“She named me Captain,” Dani said, her voice shaking, “told us goodbye, and ordered me to raise anchor soon as I could. Then she rowed to shore.”

 

Dani chewed her bottom lip and wrapped her arms around her chest. “Her face was ghastly white; her eyes were exhausted; her coat was buttoned up the neck like she'd never done before. I was confused and hurt and proud all at once, as I watched her from the wheel. That's when it hit me—good God, she’d taken her father’s place. She’d taken the chest from him and cursed herself instead." 

Dani clung to the counter rail until her knuckles turned white. “That’s why she'd locked herself away all night. Lord, we all thought she'd been grieving, but she paid her father's debt while we were sleeping so we didn’t have to know."

 

So they couldn’t see her put that knife in her chest, couldn’t see her heart beating blood in her hand.

 

"I didn’t tell my crew, figuring if she wanted us to know she would have told us herself.”

 

Anderson looked up from the tabletop. “I knew."

 

“You did?” Dani said incredulously.

 

“I’m a light sleeper. I woke that night to someone singing Hoist the Colours after midnight.”

 

“I remember that," whispered Dani, "I heard it too, wrote it off as a sleepless mate."

 

“it sounded throaty and haunted; it hurt to listen to. I couldn't help my curiosity, so I followed the noise to her cabin. I picked the lock and opened the door a little, just to see _what the hell was going on._ She never noticed me. She was sitting against the writing desk with that _damned knife_ planted in her chest. And she was fucking _singing_ to keep any other sound from from being heard.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers into his temples. “We were awed by Stella. She was our Captain. But I thought in that moment, if Stella ever had a child, she would refuse to give birth until the midwife left the room—not from embarrassment, but her stubborn sense of pride and self-reliance.” A harsh chuckle crawled up his throat, and Scully shivered. Had she been in Anderson’s place, ten years ago, she might have vomited on the deck.

 

“This was her burden,” Captain Ferrington snapped. “She had every right to bear it in privacy.”

 

Her first mate raised his hands in surrender. “I wasn’t about to burst in on her privacy! I ran right back to my cabin before I could toss up my dinner or go to her aid. Were it me, I’d want someone holding my hand steady.”

 

Scully's mind whirred—what would she have done in Stella’s position? Her father drowned long ago, but had he bargained with the Sea Devil, would she have brought his curse upon herself? Would she have sat alone in her cabin, desperately seeking the courage to place her heart in that box, or sought her mother’s comfort? No, she could never subject her mother to such a sight. She would lie in Mulder’s firm arms, or perhaps with Stella Gibson’s cold, steady hand gripping her own.  _Why Stella?_

 

“Stella remains calm under threat of death,” she said aloud. “Another person’s horror would only hinder her.”

 

“Is she so different now?” Dani inquired. "I’d ask to see her, if only she could come ashore.”

 

Scully answered, “perhaps more weathered than last you saw her, perhaps more scarred. At any rate, she bears her battle scars in the open air and equips herself with grand stories. She’s witty, low-throated, accustomed to herself and her curse. We dance to the Dutchman’s organ during squalls, for time passes slowly in rough waters.”

 

Tom and Dani were silent. Scully glanced between them uncomfortably, as the tavern's white noise suddenly separated into a hundred odd sounds, filling the space her drinking companions left empty.

 

At last, Dani opened her mouth. “I hope you find her heart in time, before Spector gets to her. And of course, I hope you find your friend.”

 

“I’m pleased to have met you both,” Scully replied. “You've been kind hosts in a less than kind port. And you certainly satisfied my curiosity.” A gunshot echoed from the back of the room. Scully stood up and ran her hand reassuringly over the hilt of her sword—Stella Gibson’s father’s sword. “That’s my cue to leave. The Dutchman has yet to grant me Stella’s invincibility, and I cannot die in the middle of a journey.”

 

“Don’t drown,” Anderson warned her casually, “or you’ll join the Dutchman’s band of voiceless ghosts. You’re wiser and more reckless than you let on, sailing with only Stella Gibson. Remember there’s only two of you against the Claudius’s crew.”

 

As the familiar ring of blades echoed from the bar fight, Scully hurried toward the door before she could repeat the incident with John Jack. “Best of luck to you both!” she called out, hoping they heard. It was a brief farewell to a long conversation, yet it seemed appropriate. There was nothing more they could bear to speak or hear.

 

Scully filled several satchels with fresh fruit and cuts of meat, hurrying from seller to seller as the moon rose overhead. She felt a sense of urgency she hadn’t at the tavern, despite the fact that high winds likely would keep the Dutchman anchored and out of sight until morning. After speaking to Stella’s old crew, she desperately wanted to see Davy Jones again, be re-introduced to the woman she’d grown accustomed to. Yet she worried her hands as she walked, her mind haunted by the image of a younger, warmer Stella staring at Philip Padgett’s knife and knowing what she must do.

 

Making friends from strangers, there was always a moment when she began to see their lives in their faces, and she had never feared that moment as much as she did striding down the grimy alleys of Tortuga to meet Stella Gibson.

 

The beach was bathed in moonlight, shimmering crystals of sand scattered across its surface. Pale dunes rose to her left, swaying like dancers in the wind. Scully took off her boots and carried them with her satchel, stumbling barefoot toward the water and relishing the feeling of cold sand against her feet. The Dutchman lay hidden on the other side of a small, shrub-covered isthmus Scully could barely make out in the dark. An orange light flickered at sea, faint and tired, and she traced the outline of a rowboat perhaps half a kilometer from her. It broke the waves quicker than any mortal boat could. Scully waded into the low tide waters to meet it, her wet clothes quickly clinging to her thighs, as if afraid they might float off and drown.

 

Stella jumped from the boat and met her in waist deep water. She looked like a mer-creature, ghostly and half submerged. The pale scar on her chest gleamed, the lines on her face exacerbated in darkness, and her blue eyes were oddly welcoming. Scully found her positively stunning, in the strapping, elegant fashion of pirates she had only met in bedtime stories.

 

Scully tossed her satchels of goods onto the rowboat and climbed in without a word. She never knew how to greet Stella—she wasn’t the type of woman Scully felt comfortable greeting in typical fashion, or in fact felt comfortable greeting at all. Stella’s gestures spoke volumes, and she offered Scully a friendly half-smile as she helped her into the boat.

 

She touched the hilt of Stella’s father’s sword. It was more ornate than the typical Navy-issue rapier, and she presumed it had been gifted to him upon his promotion to Commodore. Her own father had carried his sword everywhere, practiced on every empty street and taught her to duel every morning. Now the sea had his sword, and she had Commodore Gibson’s. She relaxed, dropping her hand into the black waves. The ocean always paid its debts.

 

“Did you find everything?” Stella sat across from her in the boat. She tapped the starboard side and pointed casually toward the Dutchman, and the rowboat changed direction.

 

Scully nodded, watching Stella wring the salt water out of her hair. A little black crab crept up Stella’s arm, and she merely arched one eyebrow and rested comfortably against the rocking wood.

 

Stella’s shipmates had cautioned her of the sea’s vastness and unpredictability, its immense power Scully knew only too well. She shifted as a wave pushed the boat into her back, and her sword flashed in the moonlight. If she died on this journey, the sea would not be what killed her. She was its welcome guest.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can never resist a bit of grisly back story, so this chapter was somewhat of an interlude. I tried to keep Tom and Dani recognizable while still working at least a little bit with the time period. I promise to move the plot forward and get to some real fighting in the next chapter.


	6. All's Fair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here there be smut.

Scully woke to the rhythmic slap of waves against the port wall and sharp prod at her waist.  The Dutchman rocked, rolling loose objects across the floorboards. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up, blinking at the harsh gleam of sunlight streaming through the porthole. Another prod against her ribs, and she turned around to find Stella Gibson pressing the handle of a flintlock pistol to her ribs.

 

“Today you learn to shoot,” Stella declared, dropping the pistol in her lap. “Not worth carrying a pistol if you can’t use it.”

 

Scully picked up the pistol and hefted it in her palm, stretching as she got to her feet. “Fair enough.” She hoped to God she wouldn’t _have_ to use the pistol and clung desperately to the possibility of rescuing Mulder without a drop of blood shed. Board the ship, break him free, return undiscovered to the Dutchman.

 

She followed Stella to the deck, where a favorable wind billowed every sail and broke white-caps at their stern, and the owl that had latched onto the Flying Dutchman perched contentedly atop its front mast, sunning its wings. “How close are we?” she asked, eyeing the horizon as if rocky cliffs could emerge any moment.

 

“A couple days, if the wind keeps,” said Stella, taking off her hat. It wasn’t the red-feathered hat she wore every day, but black tri-cornered hat that’d clearly seen better days. She climbed to the upper deck and hung it from a spoke on the wheel. “Start with this,” she ordered briskly.

 

Scully nodded and cocked her pistol, aiming carefully at the hat. She’d shot her father’s pistol before, as a child, but she hadn’t been aiming at anything at particular. She’d tromped with her wandering seven-year-old feet into her father’s office and asked if she could shoot his gun, just so she knew how it felt. He had taken to her the edge of the white cliffs and placed the pistol in her tiny hands, clasping them in his own and cocking the gun. Then he’d aimed it at the horizon line and pushed her finger down on the trigger. She had stumbled backward, knocked off her feet by the pistol’s pushback, clasping her hands to her ears as the shot went off.

 

She blew her hair out of her face, narrowed her eyes, and pushed the trigger. The bang still took her by surprise, but to her disappointment, the hat remained untouched. Instead, her bullet struck the steering wheel, lodging in its base. She looked to Stella, wondering whether her bullet would affect the ship’s course. Stella arched one eyebrow indifferently.

 

A gust of wind splayed her hair over her face, sticking red curls to her lips and blocking her view. She tucked it back again, and once the wind died down, she raised the gun again until the prow of the ivory-carved ship lined up between her eyes. This time, she would aim higher, further left. She took the shot, and a sorrowful whooshing sound informed her the bullet had soared past its target and beyond the stern.

 

She wrinkled her nose—she’d secretly expected shooting to be an easy skill to learn. It looked easy enough when other people aimed a gun. She focused on the hat, pointing the barrel just above its patched tip, cocked and shot the pistol in one deft movement like Stella had done when she fired a warning shot at the HMS Beatrice. The hat burst open and dropped from the wheel, smoldering at the crown.

 

Scully grinned triumphantly and jogged up the stairs to retrieve the target. It was warm to the touch, with a gaping hole in its very center that smelled of leather and foul ash. She tossed it over the rail just as Stella made her way to the upper deck, offering her a wry smirk.

 

“Next lesson,” Stella announced without preamble.  “Human targets.”

 

“Human targets?” How in God’s name did she aim to achieve that?

 

Stella nodded. “I stand by the wheel; you try to make a kill shot from below me.”

 

Scully’s jaw dropped. Absolutely not; Stella Gibson would not be the first person she put a bullet in. There was no way of knowing what might happen if she missed and shot Stella’s face, or stomach, or leg; Davy Jones already defied the laws of nature, and she was not about to gamble with curses she didn’t understand. She crossed her arms defiantly. “No. I refuse to shoot you.”

 

“Scully, you will most likely have to shoot a man aboard the Claudius if you ever want to see your friend Mulder again, much less bring him home with you. Sometimes you have to take a life in order to survive. To shoot a person, you have to practice on a person.”

 

“I know that,” Scully snapped. “But forgive me if I can’t swallow the idea of using you for target practice. By reason, you shouldn’t even be alive, and just because you’re comfortable with having no beating heart in your chest doesn’t mean I am. Have you considered the consequences if I miss that _hole_ in your body that shouldn’t be there? You may be a scientific anomaly, but everything I’ve read and learned says the bullet’s still going to hurt, and I’m still acquainting myself with the notion that shooting someone in the chest won’t necessarily kill them. I’m not naive, Stella. But I don’t feel like aiming a pistol at your body to remind myself how _dead_ you are even as you stand alive before me,” Scully finished with a huff. She flipped the pistol in her hand so she was gripping it by the barrel.

 

For a moment, Stella was as silent and stoic as if she were carved from wood. Her eyes were hard, her expression unreadable. She took a step toward Scully, and Scully stepped back, still squaring her shoulders for an argument.

 

“Scully,” she said softly, and Scully couldn’t tell whether she was furious or trying to reassure her. “Kind as it is of you to consider my safety, death and pain mean more to you than to they do to me. Firing your pistol at me unnerves you, and it used to unnerve me as well, Scully, but the only way you _know_ you can be better on the draw than your enemy is if you’ve a person to practice on. You cannot hurt me. I swear to it, cross my—”

 

“Cross your _damned_ heart, right,” Scully growled and marched down the stairs. She had come to terms with magic ships, and god-given curses, and the disappearing trifecta of bullet holes along Stella’s collarbone, but she want to _face_ them as if they were normalcy. As if every day science casually made exceptions like Stella’s.

 

She positioned herself by the main mast and pointed her pistol at Stella, who stood on the upper deck with her hands on her hips. “What happens if I shoot you in the face?”

 

“Inconsequential!” Stella called back.

 

She cocked the gun and aimed decisively toward Stella’s chest. Just above where her vital organ should have been, high enough to account for gravity just as she’d done when she finally hit the hat. She pulled the trigger, and opened her eyes to see the billowing sleeve of Stella’s shirt sprout a smoking hole.

 

“Further right,” Stella shouted.

 

Gritting her teeth, Scully shifted her pistol to the right and gave two more shots before furiously reloading. When she looked up, Stella was strolling calmly down the stairs, two holes in her chest.

 

“You learn fast. You’re as precise as you’ll need to be, for now, and any more distance would make the shot almost impossible.” Then Stella drew her sword.

 

“I know how to spar,” Scully insisted sharply. Her father had taught her well, and after his death she had practiced religiously. Lieutenant Scully had always pressed upon his daughter that a duel by sword was the most honorable way to take a life and the most honorable way to die in combat. It took skill and fairness, and it always left an intact body for burial, unlike the cannons of a ship.

 

“Of course you do,” said Stella. “But you must learn how to shoot in the midst of a fight.”

 

Scully raised her brow, recalling what Dani had said about Stella dueling Spector by the pirate’s code. How she could have shot him but refused, because it would violate the Pirate Code as well as the code of a proper duel.

 

“That’s not a fair fight,” Scully protested. “It’s cheating, against everything a duel stands for, and beside that it’s against the Pirate Code.”

 

Stella sighed. “Sometimes, in the midst of a battle, no code of fairness is worth abiding by. As for the Pirate Code, since when did pirates heed the rules? We’re all scallywags, eccentrics and pragmatists serving our own brands of honor. You’re a pirate too, Scully, dressing as a sailor man and buying your goods from Tortuga.”

 

 _Pirate Code,_ she scoffed. Of course the honor in swordplay meant nothing to a pirate; of course _death_ meant nothing to a woman who couldn’t die, and pain meant nothing to a woman who was literally heartless. Part of her had considered the Dutchman an adventure, but really, it was only a means to Mulder’s rescue. A way to bring him back so they could live out their lives in peace on Port Washington, studying legends of their own accord instead of having those same legends forced upon their lives. To travel with a pirate was infinitely valuable; to become a pirate was something very different. An unlawful act for the sake of justice versus an unlawful life, raiding ports and digging up gold for only selfish purposes.

 

“I am _not_ a pirate,” Scully insisted, stamping her boot on the deck and shoving her pistol back into its holster. “I will not be lumped in with the criminals who killed my father, and I don’t _invent_ my own morality as the need arises. Damn you!” she spat. “Damn you and your death-heralding organ and your bullet-holes and your callous disregard for human life.” She spun on her heel and marched across the deck, arms tightly folded.

 

“I am _not_ callous,” she heard Stella say behind her. Her voice was cold and low and dangerous. “Every man and woman aboard my ship had been grievously mistreated by the British Crown. For how they looked, for what they believed, for who they loved. Black men who escaped from enslavement, young women ostracized for taking lovers before marriage, scholars who dared question their governors, a young woman sentenced to hang for being unwilling to marry a man.”

 

“Dani,” Scully murmured under her breath, her step halting momentarily.

 

She felt the tension rise before Stella spoke, thick with accusation. “You know Dani Ferrington?”

 

“I met her in Tortuga,” Scully said curtly. “What of it?”

 

“You didn’t say anything.”

 

Scully turned to find Stella staring her down, with drawn brows and a set jaw. “Why should I? I didn’t know a goddamned thing about _you_ until I met Dani. I didn’t know who you were, where you came from, what you even _did_ before you were a walking corpse on this haunted ship.”

 

Stella hissed, “It was not your concern. You don’t know _half_ of what I did before the Dutchman. This haunted ship is in my charge, and I reserve my right to keep secrets aboard it.”

 

“No, I don’t,” Scully snarled. “Perhaps you gunned down my father’s vessel. Perhaps you flew your precious skull and crossbones over his body as he drowned.”

 

“Fuck you,” spat Stella, pale eyes ablaze. “The Jolly Rodger was my freedom. It allowed me to do as a I pleased for the first time in my fucking life.”

 

“Well now you have eternity to do it, Davy Jones.” Scully whirled around and stalked toward her cabin. “Bloody pirates,” she muttered under her breath, descending the stairs with a clunking stomp until she was far enough below deck to close the trapdoor over her head. She slammed the door to the officer’s quarters and collapsed onto her cot.

 

She lay on her back, staring at the wooden ceiling. She could hear Stella’s boots pacing above her head, in time with the Dutchman’s steady rock. A pang of guilt struck her—not even Burns had managed to wind Stella up so tightly. Stella had broken his nose and banished him from her ship, but she had calmed as soon as he was out of sight. Clearly, Scully’s words struck a sore spot.

 

 _She had no right to call me a pirate. She can’t ask me to abandon my moral judgement a live a pirate’s life whilst at sea. She’s careless of death and discretion._ But what had she expected from Stella Gibson—a deathless pirate captain who saw other people but once in ten years? When she’d set out for Los Barriles, she had sought a ferryman to bring her to Mulder, a shaky ally at best. Somehow, she’d wanted more from Stella—companionship, honesty, human connection, and she came to care for the Dutchman’s grim captain. She felt bad, accusing Stella of murdering her father; Stella would not take lives at random, and it was a stinging blow after all Stella had done to save her own father from Pagett's curse.

 

She touched her sword and linen shirt. Nearly everything she was wearing belonged to Stella, and not only did it fit her perfectly, she enjoyed romping about in clothing intended for men. She had always imagined the look of a weathered sailor would not suit her, and when her sister had swooned for the young soldiers returning from sea, she had seen battered young men with wounds to be healed. She was always a doctor in her mind; even if the town practitioner would not take a woman as his apprentice, she had pictured herself tending to wounded soldiers and curing afflictions—saving lives. She supposed she was still saving Mulder’s life, by the sword and the sail instead of by medicine.

 

Watching Stella climb boldly to the Flying Dutchman’s mast in billowing coat sleeves and a captain’s hat seemed so far removed from those thin-stubbled young men hurrying off Navy ships and merchant vessels, eager for alcohol and courtship. Time had lent Stella an attractive confidence which the men’s dress, the gritty tales, the lines and scars of her experience only magnified. Like the unreachable horizon, Stella only grew more inviting with every moment spent at sea.

 

She rolled onto her side and watched a metal bit roll across the floor. The other day, when Stella had come off the mast with her coat undone and sweat on her brow, Scully had heard her mother’s voice in her head. It was something Maggie Scully had said years ago, when it first became apparent her daughter had grander plans than a strategic marriage— _now I know you have the sea in your blood Dana. I know you won’t just find yourself a decent man and settle down, lay your archives to rest… but darling, don’t spend your whole life hoping for more than you can reach. If you can’t be a doctor, that will be that. Be happy. And maybe then you’ll meet a man who draws you in, who you love dearly like I did your old father, and he’ll not begrudge your dreams._

 

It had been days after she broke off courtship with a visiting practitioner. He was older, and charming, and arrived in Port Washington to bestow upon its local doctor the most recent medical advances. She’d been utterly taken with him. In hindsight, she had never been in love with him, so much as suffered an unfortunate infatuation—he was the first man who took her want to study medicine seriously, and he’d obliged her dreams with unofficial lessons. She had given him her virginity and to this day did not regret the choice, but the affair had proved short lived. Summoned back to England, he asked her accompany him and be his wife, under the condition she not continue her studies. Being married to a lady doctor, would tarnish his reputation, he’d informed her. She had curtly told him to go to Hell, and her mother had found her standing by the sea, glaring at his ship as it left the bay, wondering what to do next.

 

It was Stella’s utter self-assurance that reminded Scully of him. It was not the same quiet certainty with which Scully spoke her convictions, but a bluntness and way of carrying herself as if nothing would smite her or get in her way. It was as attractive in Stella as it was in her former lover, perhaps more so because as a woman, propriety expected Stella to do the opposite.

 

 _“Ready the guns!”_ Stella’s voice cut sharply into her thoughts, followed by the rumble of cannons rolling toward the gun ports and an unnerving creak along the ship’s starboard wall.

 

Scully rushed up the stairs. “Why are we firing?” she demanded.

 

Stella met her gaze coldly. “Kraken,” she hissed, jerking her chin to the starboard side. A suctioned tentacle had just crept over the railing and clung there discreetly.

 

Scully shook her head, hoping a splash of seawater might escape her ear. “I’m sorry, did you say _kraken_? As in the kraken that doesn’t exist?”

 

“A kraken, Miss Scully. The deep sea is an unknown world; is a kraken so implausible? These monsters spawn legends for a reason—krakens do to ships what sharks do to unsuspecting swimmers.” Stella cocked her pistol and fired at the tentacle. It flinched and retreated.

 

Two more slimy tentacles snaked over the rail, wrapping around the Dutchman’s foremast. Scully scurried backwards, horrified. They were grey and muscular, leaving an oily sheen in their path, and the wood creaked beneath their grip. The girth of them was all of Scully’s height.  _Well. A kraken._ She huffed aloud and pursed her lips. P _erhaps after Davy Jones it isn't so implausible._

 

“Nothing can sink the Flying Dutchman, correct?” She looked to Stella for affirmation.

 

“If the ship sinks it only repairs itself and re-surfaces,” said Stella, “but we don’t want that with you on board.” She fired two more bullets into the tentacles, but these were thicker, and they only squeezed the mast tighter. “Fuck,” she growled under her breath. Then, pointing her sword at the starboard hull. “ _Fire!”_

 

The flash and boom of cannon fire broke the ocean air as one by one, the Dutchman’s cannons emptied their load. Scully saw a triangular head erupt from the waves, and the tentacles released their ship. A splash, two more cannons. Then, as though the seafloor itself had risen, a low, thunderous rumble. Scully grabbed ahold of the netting to keep herself steady as the boat began to tremble. 

 

Six tentacles crept over the starboard side, sliding across the deck and toward Stella. She deposited bullet after bullet into them, but they only spread like tree roots and curled over any surface they could. Scully pulled her gun from its holster and shot a tentacle coming toward her; it drifted to her left and wriggled about the floor, searching for something to grab onto. The bullets didn’t seem to deter the kraken’s thicker tentacles, so she put away the gun and took out her sword.

 

“Fire!”

Another round of cannons, and one tentacle distatched completely from its owner, spraying brine and salty flesh about the ship. Pieces of fish splattered on Scully’s shirt, and she gagged at the stench. Finally, the rumbling and shaking ceased, and Scully sliced at the Kraken’s closest arm. As soon as her sword broke its skin, it shivered and retreated, its severed tip shriveling and wiggling about the ship. She shivered in disgust.

 

“Fire all!” Stella shouted, and Scully spied her briefly on the quarterdeck. Two sets of cannons rang from both flanks, and the Dutchman shook in fury. It seemed the kraken was retreating as twenty-four bombards blasted into it. An alarmed coo from above her drew her attention to the owl circling her head and crying out. Another coo sounded, and a prickling sensation froze her in her tracks. It felt as though her feet had fallen asleep, like the life was being squeezed out of them.

 

She looked down with a gasp at two tentacles creeping up her ankles, suctioning to her boots. She sliced at one desperately, and then she was flailing helplessly as the remaining tentacle dragged her toward the rail. She tried to reach it with her sword to no avail, until her body hit the wall, and her foot, still in the kraken’s arm, was above her head. She stuck her blade into the wood, chopping the tentacle around her ankle.

 

Wincing, she got to her feet. The deck was a disaster, barrels and splinters strewn about, and its surface was coated with a vomit-inducing slime, the smell of which reduced Scully to repulsed gags.

 

_Where is Stella?_

 

“It’s gone,” an exhausted voice sounded behind her, and she turned, astonished, as Stella’s face appeared over the rail. She was soaked from head to toe, and she still carried her pistol in one hand. A bruised suction mark blossomed on her wrist. “Damned creature knocked me in,” she groused.

 

Scully breathed a sigh of relief. She knew Stella could not perish, but her concern was perfectly rational. “I thought it was going to sink us for a moment,” she said with a tired laugh, offering Stella a hand.

 

Stella nodded and accepted the assistance gratefully, hauling herself back on board. “That was quite an ordeal.” She wrinkled her nose. “Swab the deck!” she called, and a mop and broom bust through the cabin door to begin the tedious process of wiping the ship clean of slime. Then Stella pulled the bandanna off her head and trudged toward her cabin, beckoning Scully to follow. “Fresh clothes for us both.”

 

“How do I get this off me?” Scully grumbled, shaking the ooze from her hands. She dropped her sword and pistol on the deck. Her shoulders ached, and her knees felt as though they might give out from weakness or worry.

 

“The clothes will never stop smelling,” Stella replied, “but you’ll want to go for a swim.” Then she disappeared into her cabin and returned with a slightly rough cut of rock. “This will scrub it from your skin, and the salt will help. We can use a barrel of fresh water from the brig as well.”

 

“How did you escape the slime?” Scully muttered as Stella wrung the water from her shirtsleeves.

 

“Did most of my fighting _in_ the water,” she said with a chuckle.

 

Scully took the stone and headed for the plank. Then she stopped, remembering how they’d left things before the fight. “I’m sorry I said you lacked honor.” She ran her hands over the soapstone and looked Stella in the eye. “And I’m sorry I accused you of killing my father.”

 

Stella glanced up from where she stood, stoking the furnace with an iron rod. “Forgiven,” she said simply. "I swear to you I did not kill him, if you need assurance. I am sorry I pushed you beyond your moral limits.”

 

“Forgiven.”

 

* * * * * * * * 

 

It was nearly dark by the time Scully had ridded herself of the kraken’s slime. It had required hours of scrubbing and a full barrel of water to wash away the salt and fish-stench. She walked back to the captain’s cabin dripping and shivering, wearing a clean but damp shirt and breeches.

 

Smoke poured from the port-hole, and Scully sighed in relief. The furnace was burning. Hoping the heat might dry her hair more quickly, she walked into the cabin. Stella was hunched over the furnace, her bare back to the door and her shirt tied about her waist.

 

“Here’s your rock,” she said, trying not to stare.

 

Stella poked the coals with an iron rod. “Just put it on the table,” she said. Scully set the rock down on the dining table and inched back toward the door. “Miss Scully—”

 

“Just Scully,” she interrupted.

 

“Scully." She stood up, the firelight flickering over her chest, casting the scar along her breast in a golden glow. John Jack’s bullet holes had completely disappeared, but there was a new white spot, two new little holes where Scully had shot her in the morning.

 

“What?”

 

“I don’t begrudge you talking to Dani. She wouldn’t have said a word if she didn’t trust you.”

 

“She saw me wearing your father’s sword.”

 

A pregnant pause. “I see.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “To be honest, I didn’t think you would board the Dutchman when you saw what I was. I didn’t think you _want_ to know me, and I was comfortable with that. Perhaps, from tonight on, we speak openly.”

 

Scully dipped her chin in ascent. “I’d like that very much.” Her eyes drifted from Stella’s ice to the hearth-glow on her freckled skin, the lines of a sailor on her face and the wiry muscles along her arms that could only come from working on a ship. The shirt around her waist and the knees of her breeches were stained with soot; her stomach was firm, her posture staunch. Her silhouette appeared on the hardwood graceful and severe. She was a woman, a death-herald, a pirate.

 

“Do the walls come down now?” she asked.

 

Stella breathed deeply. “Yes.”

 

“Dani said you escaped the same death in England from which you rescued her. Why were you charged?”

 

Stella cocked her head, and Scully felt extremely exposed. “I had many a pleasurable night with many a traveling sailor, and I heard every fisherman’s tale imaginable. For that, I was nearly charged with prostitution,” she said plainly. “Then I was caught sleeping with a married woman, a young woman named Tanya. I was charged on penalty of death in part because I’d had sexual relations with a woman, in part because Tanya was not a white woman, and mostly because she was married—however unhappily.”

 

Scully stepped toward her. “How did you escape?”

 

“I got lucky. There was a large scale prison break; I escaped with the multitudes, and hearing plenty of pirate stories from my previous liaisons, I paid for passage from rum-runners and joined the first buccaneer crew I met.”

 

“Now you’re a pirate,” Scully finished.

 

Stella lifted her chin proudly. “Never shall we die.”

 

Scully gulped, but hard she tried, she couldn’t swallow her attraction. She wanted Stella Gibson; God, how she wanted her, this elegant deathless pirate. How her heart came to desire a woman whose own heart beat in a wooden box she could not say, but her stomach fluttered. She knew it was doomed; after all, Stella was immortal and ocean-bound. But, she thought, glancing at the furnace’s pale yellow glow, she ought to enjoy the fire while she could.

 

“Scully.” Stella’s voice roused her once more. Her vision felt warm and hazy, everything in the cabin blotted out except for Stella’s body drifting toward hers. “Join me in my bed tonight?” There was no pretense in the invitation, no wiggling of eyebrows or coy innuendo. A sordid, irresistable offer.

 

“God, yes,” she breathed, and Stella’s hand slipped over her waist, and her body pressed against the pirate’s bare torso. With only thin linen separating them, she felt every muscle flex beneath Stella’s skin. One callused hand cushioned the back of her head, the other resting on the small of her back, and she clung to the nape of Stella’s neck as she met her for a kiss.

 

Stella Gibson tasted of salt, perfume, and fine liquor; her lips were chapped and rough, but her tongue was gentle. Stella’s teeth nipped at her lower lip, then drifted downward, trailing kisses along her jawbone.

 

Scully traced her fingers down Stella’s back, fluttering over every scrape, muscle and freckle as if following a map to buried treasure. She leaned into the table and arched her back, bringing Stella into her until her legs clung to the shirt on Stella’s waist. It was an apt use of a shirt, far more appealing than wearing it. She welcomed the cool surface of Stella’s bare skin, smoother and colder than most living souls, but still flushed with lust. Stella’s cheeks were still rosy, and when Scully nibbled and sucked on her shoulder, it still left a blooming purple mark.

 

When Stella’s lips left her skin, the absence was like a splash of freezing water. “Perhaps we move—” Stella began breathily, cut off as Scully’s teeth drifted to her breast with soft kisses. “To somewhere” —a gasp— “more comfortable.”

 

At last tearing her mouth from Stella’s taut nipple, Scully nodded. She huffed, a high, ecstatic sound escaping her, as Stella’s hands slid under her ass and lifted her off the table. Stella’s lips met hers once more, and Scully held desperately to Stella’s hollow cheeks. They fumbled past the cramped dining space and into Stella’s personal quarters, where Stella lay her on a firm mattress. The bed was lavish, and it took up almost the entire room. The walls were bare and the ceiling low, but ornately embroidered pillows decorated half the bed, and the comforter upon which she lay was a rich scarlet.

 

Stella knelt before her, sweating a bit but utterly breathless. “Are you certain—”

 

“Positive,” Scully growled, reaching for the button Stella’s trousers and wriggling free of her shirtsleeves. Then Stella’s knees were on either side of her, and the pirate’s hands pushed her shirt over her head. She pushed Stella’s breeches away and rid herself of her own, and as soon as they bare, she pulled Stella’s weight on top of her. Skin on skin, scars on scars, breast on breast, Scully tangled herself wildly in Stella’s body. She felt a hand drift toward her aching center, and she grew wetter by the second. She curled into Stella’s teasing caresses, her teeth toying with Stella’s taut nipple and reveling as muscles clenched beneath her touch.

 

As Stella’s fingers inched between her legs, her own hand searched blindly until she trailed it down Stella’s stomach and toward her swollen center. They maneuvered in the crimson sheets, misaligned and knotted together like mangroves slowly weaving their roots together and sapping their lives from the sea, until finally they could be inside each other. Scully thrust and curled, rocking against Stella’s legs in time with the ship, at the same time experiencing the rush of Stella moving expertly within her. Her breath hitched; she let out a needy whimper. She thrust faster as Stella’s walls clenched around her fingers, and she knew her own body was doing the same, climbing with Stella, and the knowledge that she could bring such a grave, formidable woman to such unrestrained pleasure only excited her further.

 

She came first, crying out primally as if announcing their courtship to the sea. The rhythm of her hand grew ragged, but it was more than enough to push Stella over the edge, as moments later, a high-pitched moan and a ragged sigh passed Stella’s lips. Scully fell back beside her, admiring the ticks of Stella’s face as she descended back to reality. Her lower lip trembled slightly in orgasm, and it made Scully smile.

 

There she lay with Stella, reckless bodies on sweaty red sheets, entwined in the heart of the Flying Dutchman, bound beneath the fluttering Jolly Rodger. Scully’s copper hair lay splayed over Stella’s bare chest, wrapping around the mark of Davy Jones. Her muscles quaked, and she feared if she tried to stand she might collapse. So there she stayed, encased in Stella’s arms, until the ocean lulled her to sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let this be the first of many sordid encounters between the infamous captain and her lover.


	7. Hall of the Moerae

“You’ll have to cut it off,” Stella said apologetically, brushing her fingers through the knot in Scully’s hair.

 

Scully frowned. The musky air and saltwater swims made her hair wild and tacky. One morning she’d woken with a bird’s nest tangle, and unable to brush it out, she had watched it get progressively worse. She had always enjoyed her long red curls, the intricate updos she had worn on the mainland. She supposed the life she was currently living called for a change.

 

“Cut it,” she muttered.

 

“Aye.” Stella nodded and unsheathed her dagger. It was thin and well-polished, gleaming in the moonlight. A lump rose in Scully’s throat, but she forced it down. The metal touched her sunburnt neck, and she fought back a shiver.

 

Stella pulled the wavy ends of her hair taut between callused fingers, and Scully heard the soft chop as she sliced them through, like the sound of an old woman snipping the end of her sewing thread. She tossed the knotted bundle of Scully’s hair into the sea.

 

Scully touched the clean-cut ends of her hair, settling just above her shoulder blades. Loose and flat-bottomed and fluttering about her cheeks, a feeling she was unaccustomed to after years of complicated knots and braids tugging at her neck.

 

“I like it,” she said.

 

Stella drummed her fingers on Scully’s waist. “You haven’t seen it yet.”

 

“Regardless, I like it.” It was easy and amateur, off-kilter in a way that belonged beneath a sailor’s cap. _Perhaps a kerchief,_ she mused, eyeing the dark banana tied around Stella’s forehead as if she were a bandit.

 

Stella’s hand loosened on Scully’s waist, slipping down to her hip. “Pirate,” she whispered, and with her back turned Scully didn’t know whether she’d meant it to be heard.

 

“Fuck me,” Scully muttered under her breath, meant to reach Stella’s ears.

 

Stella spun her quickly around so their noses bumped awkwardly, and Stella’s bloodless chest pressed against her, pushing her backward. Their boots scuffed the deck, meandering slowly toward the converging V of the bow until Scully’s back hit wood.

 

The pirate’s cold hands tugged teasingly at the waist of her trousers.

 

“Fuck me,” Scully murmured again. “Fuck me right here on deck, and I don’t care how many ghosts can hear us.”

 

Stella pressed their lips together, and neither the salt sticking to their skin nor the cracks in their lips worried them. Scully pressed her elbows into the wheel, her shirt slipping from her shoulder as Stella wrapped an arm between her back and the ship’s splintered wood. She deepened the kiss, pulling Stella’s cool body toward her until it didn’t matter if Stella’s hand was in the way—her spine dug into the ship.

 

She slid down the wall, her teeth grazing Stella’s bottom lip. Her skin was dusted in crystals of salt, the crinkles in her eyes glittering in the moonlight. Weathered and tanned in daylight, Stella was bone-white in the dark, a phantom with roving fingers and a sharp tongue.

 

They knotted together on splitting boards; splinters crept into Stella’s knuckles, into her knees, and lined Scully’s spine like stitches as Stella ground their bodies against each other. A sound escaped her she could neither recall nor repeat as Stella’s hand slid beneath her trousers, and she rocked to the rhythm of the Dutchman. No one could catch them here, and she didn’t bite her tongue or hold back a moan; she didn’t swallow down her encouragement as Stella fucked her against the swaying wheel. When she came, she cried out, and the ocean swallowed it for her.

 

* * *

 

They leaned against the bow as the night sky opened before them like a kraken's maw. Scully could smell the salt clinging to her skin, wrinkling her shirt and breeches. Her hat had only done so much to shade her from the sun, and she could feel her lips split at their seams like doll stitches. Her skin was tan and flaky—what was salt and what was sunlight she couldn’t discern. Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, as if she’d aged years in the time she’d spent on the Flying Dutchman. If she had, it might not have surprised her. Few things could surprise her anymore.

 

She turned to Stella, who was swigging a bottle of rum from the cellar. She wasn’t drunk—the dead didn’t get drunk, apparently. Her blonde hair was still post-coital wild, though she’d straightened the purple bandanna tied snugly around her forehead. It enhanced her angular features, lining up her eyebrows and darkening her already stern stare. She wore nothing over her breasts, nothing over the thick, white scar that sliced between them. Her shirt was wrapped around her waist; only a hip holster crossed her chest, her pistol resting snugly inside it.

 

“Target practice tomorrow?” Scully asked, eyeing the pistol.

 

Stella cocked her head. “Perhaps. Though I won’t be surprised if we spot our destination in the morning. I’m not sure what one more lesson will do for you; you’ve learned everything you’re prepared to do.”

 

“If I have to shoot a man, I will.”

 

Stella nodded as if she were satisfied. “It’s not just about that,” she said after a long pause. “Sometimes it’s not about who shoots first, kill or be killed. I know that when you kill a man, it’s a strike against your moral righteousness. It’s not about knowing when to strike the blow without doing wrong—you’re always doing wrong. It’s about being okay with the wrong, knowing that sometimes being the pirate is being the better man.”

 

Scully held her gaze. “I know.”

 

“You’re not going to be moral if you live through this venture. You have to square with a fucked up moral compass. When you pull that trigger, you may not be right, but sometimes being right and being just don't line up. Scully, that is the last shooting lesson I can give you, and it’s one I learned late.”

 

“You learned it when Spector escaped?”

 

Stella pressed her lips together. “Yes.”

 

“Do you regret that night?” Scully asked.

 

Stella sighed, twirling a strand of blonde hair on her finger and tossing it over her shoulder. Her eyes narrowed; her shoulders tensed. “I regret not shooting him—I thought I was bound by the honor of a proper duel. Ten years to mull it over, and I’ve realized the woman he murdered deserved greater justice than I did honor. My name and honor are worth little but legend.”

 

“He ripped Padgett's knife from your neck.” The bare cord hung between Stella’s bare breasts, frayed and withered with time. It dangled ominously between she and Scully each time they had sex. It scratched Scully's face when Stella lay atop her in the captain's cabin.

 

“No he didn’t," admitted Stella.

 

“That’s what you told Burns,” Scully said wrinkling her brow.

 

Stella shrugged tensely. “It sounds more foreboding than what actually happened—I left it in Dani’s cabin, so that no one who saw it would know it belonged to Davy Jones. But I didn’t know Spector was already searching for it, had already seen it on Padgett himself many years ago. He stole it from the Ophelia, and Dani only realized after he’d vanished into the horizon. My only assurance was that he would never find the heart it carved.”

 

“Why lie?”

 

“Because the age-old tale of vengeance—the knife tearing from ‘round my neck, the burns of strangling cord—are truer to me than a thief nicking a dagger from an empty cabin as if he hadn’t just raped a young woman next door.”

 

She wondered how much of the myth of Stella Gibson was truer than her reality. How much of Davy Jones felt more real than Stella herself? She questioned aloud, “Is that why you wear the cord?”

 

“It reminds me of the threat Spector still poses. It reminds me that I must deal him justice, because no one else will.”

 

Scully remembered her father’s final words of advice before he departed on his final Navy voyage. He had passed her a lucky compass, broken some years after his death, pushed her tiny finger over the needle and pointed to the North shore.

 

_Never check your compass on the Captain’s Dana. Always align it to the stars on your own._

 

Lieutenant Scully hadn’t joined the Navy because his fellows did. He had witnessed the duties no one wanted were often the most important. He swabbed sand and salt from the deck each morning and polished swords after a battle. Perhaps he was meticulous, a perfectionist who’d learned trust only his own hands. Scully only imagined him as righteous and true-hearted, witty at the most crucial of times.

 

She ruffled her newly-shorn hair. Would he be proud of the woman she had become? Had he been alive, would have stopped her going after Mulder? Would he have brought her aboard a Navy vessel and told horror stories of the Flying Dutchman?

 

Scully leaned against the ship’s twelve-spoked wheel, shifting with the creak of its aged wood. “Stella,” she started cautiously.

 

“Yes?” Stella sheathed her dagger.

 

“What did your father say when you took his place? How did he not…” she trailed off.

 

Stella sighed. “I didn’t give him a chance to say anything. When I arrived in London, he didn’t recognize me at first; he couldn’t reconcile the pirate with the elegant young woman he remembered. He never came to terms with the lawless aged captain—perhaps it was the piracy, or perhaps he simply never accepted my aging.

 

“We were too different to talk about our lives—imagine the dinner conversation between a pirate captain and Navy commander—but we did have an understanding. At any rate, when my mother told me to remove the bandanna from my head for dinner, he told me not to listen. He understood the sailor's ways, if nothing else.”

 

Stella laughed and shook her head. “He was a grave man, my father. He had these dark, hollow eyes like the tunnels beneath windswept saplings and skin like crumpled parchment. He always looked haunted to me, though I never saw him before his encounter with Padgett. That day, though, he seemed a skeleton; he had thinned and lengthened and when I put the chest on the table his fingers wrapped around it, long and slim as sewing needles.

 

“‘So the Dutchman has come for me,’ he said, and—” she chuckled humorlessly— “my poor mother fainted in her chair. He knew what it entailed; he knew the bargain he had made. He placed the chest on his nightstand and went about saying his goodbyes to friends and neighbors. All evening, folk I hadn’t seen in years dropped by the house to see him. He had sung at their grandparents’ funerals, taught them to sail, told them every story he knew from his Navy days to their adventure-hungry children, seen them born and raised and married.

 

“One by one they stepped over the threshold of my family home and shook my father’s hand, said hello to my mother. Then they would hurry off at the sight of me. I frightened them, with my sword and kerchief, an escaped convict and a pirate inside and out. And I wanted nothing to do with them after the distain they’d showed me as a young girl.

 

“That night I wanted nothing more than to sleep in my rocking ship, free of the men and women who knew my name before it had ‘Captain’ in front. I could hear my father toss miserably in his sleep. I made up my mind then, and took the chest from his bedside table and left a note— _our debts are paid_. If he was awake, he didn’t look at me.”

 

Scully sat with her legs curled to her chest, against the wheel. She marveled at Stella’s matter-of-fact tone.

 

“What made up your mind, if you don’t mind my asking?” She still hesitated to pose such personal questions, despite their pledge of honesty, and despite knowing Stella in what she considered the most personal fashion. Stella kept her emotions far more private than her body. Scully was quite the opposite, excepting the small treasure of secrets she would hardly breathe to herself.

 

“The sea was my home, but my father… he always said his voyages were no more than interludes. He loved his neighbors, the moors, and his quiet cottage on a hill. He loved his wife and children, and every stranger he met in the streets on warm, clear nights.”

 

She paused, looking over the Dutchman’s rail to a full moon trembling on the ocean surface. “My father loved everyone he met,” she said, “and I loved my father.”

 

Scully reached for the sharp edge of Stella’s cheek, then thought better of it. “Is he still alive?”

 

Stella shrugged. “I’ve no idea. I never saw him again.”

 

Perhaps that was Stella—a grand figure vanishing on the horizon, never to be seen again. Scully crossed her arms and shivered in the night breeze. The waves trembled weakly like a puddle on the street, starlit and welcoming. Not at all the roaring storm they had tempted when they danced to the organ of Davy Jones.

 

“Look at that horizon,” Stella murmured, resting her elbows on the ship’s rail. She cocked her head, meeting Scully’s eyes matter-of-factly.

 

“It’s easy to love the horizon,” said Scully. “You know it’ll never leave you.”

 

“Ah,” said Stella with a crooked half-smile, “but neither will you catch it.”

 

Scully wrapped her hand around Stella’s shirt-wrapped waist. “That’s what makes it easy. You don’t have to live with the hope of catching up to it. Because once you’ve got the sunset in your hands, dim and warm and copper-red, you have to open your fingers before it burns you and hope it doesn’t disappear forever. You have to be afraid. If you never catch it in the first place, you've nothing to be afraid of.”

 

Stella’s blue eyes were foggy in the dark as she took Scully’s hand and raised it to her lips. “Good night.”

 

*     *     *

 

Scully woke to the slosh of uneven waves and the high-pitched scream of gulls overhead. It took her a moment—head cocked, eyes bleary with sleep and confusion, before she remembered what birds sounded like.

 

 _Tortuga,_ she sounded the word on her lips. The land of scavengers, men and shorebirds alike. _Land_ —that was the word she was looking for. In an instant, she shook herself awake.

 

“Shore on starboard!” Stella shouted from the quarterdeck, muffled through the ceiling. “Raise a full canvas until I can see the Claudius with my naked eye.”

 

The ship creaked and swayed beneath her, and when she tried to stand her knees wobbled dangerously. She picked her scabbard off the floor and belted it around the waist. She tied a grey scarf round her neck to keep the sun off and fetched her hat from the foot of the bed, just as Stella’s boots clumped roughly down the stairs. Stella burst into the captain’s cabin, her sword flashing in a stray sunbeam.

 

“We made it,” said Stella, and Scully couldn’t help but notice the tremor in her voice.

 

“Any sign of the Claudius?”

 

Stella shook her head. “The islands have only just come into view.”

 

“How will they know which island?” At first Scully had pictured Stella’s heart buried on a barren strip of sand surrounded by a grove of dying palms. Then, she had imagined a lush paradise, fed by a river and a cliff of glittering waterfalls. She had conjured yet unknown species of flora and fauna, fish the color of fresh fruit and whistling birds on every branch. What she truly expected of the eternal resting place of Stella’s beating heart, Scully could not say. But if there were several islands, could Stella even remember herself which she had set foot on?

 

“Simple,” Stella answered as Scully followed her on deck. “Davy Jones buries her heart in the Hall of the Moerae, just as Padgett buried it there before. The trees grow from rivers of sand and spring-water, and their roots spin together like cages of thread. No ship can navigate the maze; the island must be navigated on foot, and beyond the swampland, it is a barren landscape with little but cacti, dry grasses and white rock. There is nowhere for a thief to hide.”

 

“So your heart guards itself?”

 

Stella sighed. “One could say that. If only Spector didn’t have the damned knife and a prisoner who knows too many old wives’ tales.”

 

Hesitantly, Scully touched the pirate’s weathered cheek, but her hand drifted downward, past the distinct bullet hole on her collarbone, to the pale scar on her chest. “I’ll go ashore.”

 

Stella narrowed her eyes. “Are you absolutely certain?”

 

“Mulder’s the only person alive who can lead him to the island. He’s a scholar; he has dedicated his life to studying the legends that inhabit these waters. He’ll be needed on shore if Spector ever wants to find your heart.”

 

“Fair enough.” Stella nodded thoughtfully and lifted her spyglass to her eye. “We’re approaching the largest island. The main inlet leads to the Hall of the Moerae.”

 

Scully took the spyglass and peered into it. The shore was a thin strip of black sand; behind it volcanic rock and a veritable wall of undergrowth. She searched the glass until she spotted Stella’s channel: the mouth of a river, choked with towering trees, roots that stretched like spider legs over the water. She shifted the spyglass further. Waves crashed against spires of rock; the water roiled and burst against itself.

 

“If he touches Mulder,” she growled, “or if he dares to touch your heart, we will be his worst fucking nightmare.”

 

Stella arched an eyebrow. “It’s not about my heart, Miss Scully.”

 

“What do you mean?” Scully lowered the spyglass, fixing Stella with a skeptical stare.

 

“I’ve been searching for Spector ever since he escaped the Ophelia ten years ago, but I would be hunting him even if he’d never touched that dagger. It’s about the ship he defiled and the crimes he committed against a young woman aboard. I was Captain of the Ophelia, and it is my duty to avenge the young woman raped and murdered on that ship. Now, I am Captain of the Flying Dutchman, and it is my duty to send Paul Spector to Davy Jones’ Locker.”

 

It was the first time Scully had heard such venom in her voice. It was cold and dry; it haunted like a blustering wind through cracked rock. “Would you still chase him, if not for the Dutchman?” She knows the answer, but she does not trust her understanding of Stella Gibson.

 

“It is my duty as a captain, a pirate, and a woman. Pirates are lawless because the laws have failed us. Make no mistake—a pirate’s life is not the moral high ground. We pillage, raid, duel, plunder unattainable treasures and bring upon ourselves terrible curses. But there is a catch to our lawlessness, written in the Pirate’s Code—the lawless must seek justice for each other.”

 

Scully thought of Mulder, rotting in the Claudius’s dungeon—or worse, marching hand-cuffed beneath the blazing sun with a pistol pressed to his neck. as he searched for Davy Jones’ heart to save his own life. _The only people who know how to find pirates are better pirates,_ Skinner had told her. She hoped that when she boarded the Claudius she would be a better pirate than Spector.

 

In the noonday light, the archipelago seemed to move toward them, splitting the waves it rode. In actuality the Dutchman drifted closer to its beating heart, thumping reliably to a breezy ocean. Scully had grown accustomed to its unique rock, and she was not looking forward to boarding another ship. Her father had always told her no two ships were alike, and she couldn’t imagine losing her sea legs now.

 

“The Claudius is likely anchored behind those cliffs.” Stella pointed to an inlet hidden behind jagged cliff bands and talons of rock that jutted upwards from the sea.

 

“Can we take her by surprise?”

 

“The Dutchman cannot sink in such shallow waters, and regardless, you can’t sail with your head beneath the waves.”

 

Scully huffed, screwing her eyes shut. “My sense of self-preservation wants to blow Spector out of the water, but what if Mulder is aboard? How do we know whether Spector has taken him ashore?”

 

Stella raised the spyglass once more. “We don’t.”

 

“Thank you for your vote of confidence.” Scully rolled her eyes. She was distinctly aware of her nervous ticks—swiping her tongue over her already dry lips, a foot tapping the deck, arms crossed tightly over her chest—all of which intensified as they approached the islands. Her fingers drifted to the hilt of her pistol, nestled in a hip holster. Could she trust herself to take the shot? Could she trust herself _not_ to?

 

They skirted the pale cliff-bands, and Scully had to crane her neck to see the top. A horde of sea-birds circled overhead, emerging from the higher crevices. Waves crashed and gurgled at the base of the rock, leaving a blue-green tint in its furrows and cracks. The rock face looked like cold butter, as if she could squeeze it and leave an indent for centuries to come.

 

As the Dutchman rounded a corner and floated into the big island's Eastern bay, Scully spied another ship anchored near the river mouth. Its blood red sails were tied up, and its flag lowered. It was a stout ship, thick and short and less than streamlined. Its boards were mismatched, replaced at different times as if to patch up the holes made by cannons. A well-armed ship, its port flank had two rows of eight cannons.

 

Scully pursed her lips. “Is that the Claudius?”

 

“It is.” Stella lowered her spyglass. “The crew does not seem to be aboard.”

 

“What about a prisoner?” Scully demanded, reaching for the spyglass.

 

Stella snorted. “If I could see through the walls of the brig, I would tell you.”

 

Scully finally wrestled the spyglass from Stella’s fingers and raised it to her eye. “I don’t see any rowboats.” Squinting, she turned to the shoreline. “Those, however, look very much like rowboats.”

 

“Where are they?”

 

“Lined up next to the inlet.”

 

“Hall of the Moerae,” Stella murmured grimly. “They will force their way through the swamp.” Her voice hardened again. “Look for a moving figure.”

 

Scully scanned the shoreline; she focused for a few seconds on the inlet—its waters looked a frightening deep green, and its entrance was obscured by a tangle of roots that seemed to ward off trsspassers. She looked to the tree line on either side of the estuary—thick, white-trunked palms with bundles of coconuts so big she could spot them from where she stood. A flash of movement crossed her vision, and she froze. Several figures marched along the tree line, clumped in groups of two and three. While their faces were a blur, and their clothing nondescript, she could only just make out a man at the back, who plodded and stumbled forward as if dragged.

 

 _As if he were wearing handcuffs,_ Scully realized, and the blood drained from her cheeks. “I see them!” she shouted, and Stella winced beside her, cupping her ear. “Beside the river. I see Mulder.”

 

It was the first glimpse she’d had of Mulder—hopefully the man was Mulder—in months. She had a hard time counting the weeks since she had left Port Washington, and every day she woke wondering if the man she’d left her life to rescue was even alive. She stiffened momentarily, remembering that _she_ would have to go ashore. Recently every horizon, every gunshot, every encounter with a kraken or a schmoozing privateer, had been hers and Stella’s to face. As soon as she set foot on dry land, the battles became hers alone. If she was captured, Stella could do nothing while her feet touched the shore. If she died, Stella would never know.

 

“We’re close enough to row in. Are you ready?” Stella placed a chilly hand on her shoulder, but her voice had a far-away ring. She felt a gentle shake.

 

“Yes?” She put down the scope and met Stella’s eyes.

 

“Are you prepared to go to shore?”

 

Scully felt her pistol; she hefted it in her hand to be sure it was full before tucking it away. She touched her sword in its scabbard and jostled the buckle of her belt and holster to reassure herself it was secure. “Yes.”

 

Stella furrowed her brow. Scully pushed back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and nodded decisively. Stella let her go.

 

“Ready a rowboat!” Stella marched down the staircase onto the main deck as the canvas flew off a rowboat and landed in a heap at her feet. The boat flipped over and dropped into the water. A knotted rope tossed itself over the rail behind it. “Raise the sails, drop anchor as soon as possible. I don’t want to be too close to the Claudius.”

 

Scully’s boots clicked as she followed Stella down the stairs. She sat on the railing, clinging to the offered rope, and swung her legs over. As she lowered her weight onto the rope, she threw a final glance over her shoulder. Above her, a soft, winged silhouette perched on the mast, that Scully realized was the owl she had met in Los Barriles. It had been scarce recently, but now it sat motionless next to the Jolly Rodger, solemnly watching its captain. Stella leaned against the mast, her eyes narrowed at some speck on the horizon. Her purple kerchief and sun-bleached hair fluttered in the breeze.

 

“Thank you,” Scully said.

 

Slowly, Stella turned her head. “All the best to you, Miss Scully. If everything goes to Hell, I’ll blow Spector’s ship to smithereens.”

 

Scully smiled. She let go of the rope and dropped into the rowboat with a clunk. The bucket scooped a pale full of water. Creaking in their grips, the oars pulled her forward. The Dutchman shrank; where one moment Stella stood with her back to the land, the next she disappeared, as if she’d never been more than a ghost to begin with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I failed to make good on my promise that there'd be a battle in this chapter, but they did have sex again so I'm giving myself a free pass. I had to move the fight scenes forward to make room for the sex, and I have no regrets.


	8. The Smoking Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scully and Mulder are finally reunited. 
> 
> Trigger Warning: there will be gore in this chapter.

Waves lapped gently at the rowboat as Scully drifted ashore. It was a well-protected bay, and the high winds that had carried the Dutchman forward were noticeably absent. The air thickened; it settled into her neck, her knees, the crevices of her collarbones, leaving behind the sticky sheen of salt and sweat. Once pleasant, the water’s grimy tang saturated uncomfortably in her nostrils, and she missed the open ocean.

 

The oars rowed her into waist-deep shoals, where she hopped from the boat and picked her way to shore. Guarding the tree line with her peripheral vision, she watched her rowboat propel itself back to the Dutchman. The Flying Dutchman itself was no more than a slender mast in the distance, breaking the ocean surface with a swaying black flag.

 

She emptied the water from her boots and shook off the sand and pebbles sticking to her trousers. Palm trees loomed menacingly overhead, and she struggled along the beach. Sand seeped into cracks in the soles of her boots, until she slipped them off for good. Several sets of tracks vanished at the end of the beach, where the stream trickled quietly into the bay. As she approached, the treeline thickened, looming menacingly overhead. The familiar arch of palm trees gave way to pallid trunks so thick a cannon ball couldn’t barrel through. A tangle of roots broke the sand like the arms of a kraken, and more than once she misplaced a foot and nearly tumbled into their grasp. The island felt as though any moment it would come to life and swallow her whole, drooling into the sea. And she was stepping into its watery tongue.

 

A gruff-throated shout quelled her hesitation as she stood on the bank of the Hall of the Moerae—she could not afford to worry away time. The wove over her head, a slithering tunnel of knee-deep water. Tiny crabs danced at her ankles, popping out of the sand wherever she took a step. She ducked the first root, stepping in and out of the maze. These trees erupted from the water on root cages that from below, looked like spider legs, as if a train of enormous spiders were lumbering their way up stream. Once crystal clear, the water grew murkier as she pushed forward, turning a sickly shade of green. Withered leaves shaped like dead stars floated by, a few of them clinging to her trousers. She flicked them away mercilessly.

 

As the trees thickened, thorny vines crept into path, wrapping around the root systems and tugging at her clothing like a million tiny hands reaching through jail bars to keep her from ever leaving them behind. She hacked one away, and it recoiled spitefully before extending back out to catch her again. No wonder Stella, and Padgett before her, left their hearts here. The Hall of the Moerae was its own beast, guarding Stella’s heart as if its beat kept the island alive.

 

She would every other moment catch the ring of voices and the clank of weaponry and freeze with her blade sliced halfway through a vine. The further she walked, the more distinctly her hair would stand up. Her stomach tingled; her shoulders tightened. Every muscle in her body aligned for a fight, and she could only hold them enough to keep quiet. She kept one hand on her pistol no matter how thick the vines grew.

 

A man’s voice—young and clear—called out indistinctly. She wondered if that was the infamous Paul Spector, that amiable tenor calling over the palms and underbrush. It wasn’t Mulder’s voice, that she could be certain of. Mulder’s voice was surer, richer, leaking confidence and lacking rage. She didn’t want Mulder’s voice to reach her, but she was all too prepared to hear his cry of pain. She was all too prepared to fail, to find him dead or dying and haul his body back to Port Washington to be buried. Her mother had told her more than once,  _ “you’re so cynical, Dana.”  _ when she readied herself for the worst possible outcome. But Scully was perhaps a more passionate woman than her family gave her credit for. The only way she could live with a tragic outcome was to steel herself beforehand.

 

She closed in on the voices and crept from the stilling river. Pulling her boots from where they’d hung in her belt and slipping them back on, Scully drew her pistol. Ideally, she could grab Mulder and run, but she knew better than to expect an easy escape. A twig snapped beneath her foot, and she froze. Silence. Thick, muggy silence.

 

A flock of red birds erupted from the palms, squawking frantically. She jumped and ducked behind a tree, her stomach crawling up her throat. Her heart drummed her from the inside.

 

As bracken closed behind her, and the glitter of sunlight on the creek gave way to gnat-thick air and menacing shadows, she spotted a white shirt propped against a tree. Creeping closer, she made out a man with tousled brown hair and a tanned face. He bit into a cloth gag. He sat on his hands, and a rope wrapped around his chest tied him to the tree.  _ Mulder.  _ She could make out his pointed nose and the strength with which he held himself even in captivity. He held his chin high and sat with royal posture against the palm trunk. Her breath caught in her throat, and his eyes met hers. She nearly rushed to him, catching herself in a moment. He struggled against his bonds, bare feet scrabbling against the dirt, his bicep digging into the rope.

 

It took her a moment to realize—he didn’t recognize her. She took a step closer. He wrenched his cheeks around the gag; she wondered if he would really call his captors for help. Perhaps he would; after all, his life was more valuable to them than to a pirate stranger searching for loot. She untied the bandanna and tucked it into her belt, running her fingers through her copper hair. “Mulder!” she called. His eyes widened. “Mulder, it’s me.”

 

He stopped struggling, and she hurried to him, keeping a hand at her sword. She tied the bandanna back up to hold her hair out of her face and carefully sliced the gag and bounds with her cutlass. For a moment, she took him in—Mulder, her partner in crime, the man for whom she’d first boarded the Flying Dutchman, whom she’d come all this way to save. Linen fibers clung to his lips, and his cheeks bloomed red with sunburn. She reached out a hand, instinctively, and pulled him to his feet. His hazel eyes widened.

 

“Scully…” he croaked. God, he sounded like it burned him to talk. He ran his hands over the prickly stubble on his neck, rubbed out his eyes. His wrists bloomed a raw pink where the rope had been and when he shook them out the joints crackled.

 

Scully opened her mouth, huffed into the musty air and waited for words that clamped down in her throat instead. Her lip trembled, against her will. Here was a man she trusted with her life; here was a man she had known for so long he could read her better than she could herself. Yet, somehow, she felt a stranger to him, as if she was staring at him through a stained glass window. Slowly, her eyes watering, she wrapped her arms around his middle—thinner than she remembered, but not altogether gaunt. She felt his chin settle on the top of her head, pressed against her kerchief. She felt the clench of his jaw.

 

“Scully…” he trailed off again, as if he couldn’t fathom he was saying her name. His shoulders slumped, and he let her go, holding her at arm’s length. His eyes drifted over her, head to toe, wide and curious and incredulous. “Scully, how are you here?” A huff of laughter escaped him. His dry lips parted in a smile. He exhaled through his nose and reached up to touch her sheared off hair, her sunburnt cheek, her bony shoulder.

 

“I followed you across the whole Caribbean, Mulder,” she breathed, a wide, toothy smile to catching her by surprise as she looked up at him. “I chased you here.”

 

“You look…” his eyes drifted again. “You look so different.”

 

“Eloquent,” she retorted. But there was no escaping it—she looked unmistakably different from when she had bid him farewell on the docks, so many weeks ago. Not just her hair, but her skin had settled into her cheekbones, carving her in the same weathered, angular vein as Stella, if less severe. Her clothing, too; she kept forgetting that she was wearing Stella’s clothes and carrying Stella’s sword. It felt natural to her, almost grafted to her after weeks of wearing it at sea.

 

For a moment, she rested her forehead against his chin. She breathed him in, his familiar frame and his square jaw pushing on her skin. He was breathing; his body expanded and contracted rhythmically. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tightly, engulfing her wiry frame. She could not allow them another second.

“Mulder,” she said, pulling away. “we have to hurry. You know they’ll be back for you.” She pressed her palm to the hilt of her sword.

 

He didn’t say anything, at first. Then he nodded, gesturing her the lead in an un-Mulder-like manner. She picked a path back through the undergrowth that wound meticulously around dead leaves and snapped twigs. At last, as they stepped down onto the riverbank, he asked, “Scully, how did you find me?”

 

She could the waver in his voice. She would have to explain carefully, for Mulder had all sorts of pre-conceived superstitions fluttering about his head. “I found a captain that would take me.”

 

“Who?” he pressed as she hacked her way back into the Hall of the Moerae. “How do you know we can trust him?”

 

“ _ Her,  _ Mulder. And you don’t have a choice but to trust her. She’s the only way we can leave this island.”

 

She felt his hand on her shoulder. “Scully, you know how grateful I am that you came for me. I never imagined when you told me on the docks you’d scour the ocean to bring me back, that you had the power to do so. I am in awe, but I can’t trust anyone but you.” He lowered his voice, as if afraid the birds would overhear him and betray his secrets. “Spender’s a traitor.”

 

She stiffened. “What do you mean?”

 

Mulder pulled a tiny slice of rope from a cut on his lip. “I mean exactly what I said. We were sailing for only a few days when the Chiron appeared on our horizon, with an unfamiliar ship beside it. We hailed it, but within minutes both ships’ guns were raised. They flew the Union Jack, Scully; our men never stood a chance against ships they thought were their allies. The Chiron and Captain Spector’s ship gunned us down; pirates boarded, took me hostage, and blew the Macbeth’s powder keg as soon as they had me off the ship. They took me to Spender and Captain Spector.

 

“Governor Spender is behind it all, Scully. He arranged for my kidnapping, and the death of the crew. He’s paying the pirates a pretty sum to lead him to Davy Jones’ heart—Spector has the only knife that can cut it, you know—and he forced me to guide them both here.”

 

Governor Spender, the man who left Port Washington aboard the Chiron a year ago to rid the sea of pirates, armed with a lit pipe and two dozen cannons—her instant reaction was to deem it implausible that Spender would betray his port. But the scar on Stella’s chest flickered into her mind, the words she’d spat at Captain Burns’ face.  _ The motherland has never shown me respect.  _ Scully remembered the gilded glow of Spender’s pipe smoldering in the basement office as he paid her and Mulder a visit, as he asked them about the ocean’s mysteries and mused on the unmitigated evil of piracy. Spector, Burns, the smoking Governor—they were all the same, insecure men shriveling in the face of the Death that takes everyone equally. And it was women like Stella, like the nameless girl murdered aboard the Ophelia all those years ago, who suffered for it.

 

She had to ask, “did they find the heart?”

 

Mulder shook his head. “They needed me to get this far, but even I was at a loss as to where on this island Davy Jones would bury his heart.”

 

She resisted the urge to correct him, ‘her heart.’

 

“It must be well-hidden,” Mulder continued. “Because it’s the world’s most powerful bargaining chip unless you believe in the keys to the Underworld. If you threaten Davy Jones, you rule the sea. That’s what Spender wants. But if Captain Spector finds it, he’ll probably stab it, and then someone will kill him for his own heart, and on and on until the Dutchman comes for one of them.”

 

Her sword sliced half-way through another vine. “Mulder—”

 

“I know you think it’s outrageous,” he continued breathlessly “I know you don’t believe in curses or the Flying Dutchman or the heart of Davy Jones, but—”

 

“Mulder!” she snapped. “I believe you. But the Flying Dutchman is already here.” She owed him an explanation before she asked him to board a ship devoid of all but a dead-alive pirate.

 

His brow wrinkled, and he eyed her suspiciously. “What do you mean the Flying Dutchman is here?”

 

“Mulder… I wish I could explain everything to you this instant, but sooner or later your captors will return from their hunt to find you missing. You’ll have to trust me.”

 

She stepped on a loose rock, and her foot slid out from under her. She clenched a fist around his shirt, emitting a silent squeak as she lost her balance in the stream. He held her over the stream and lifted her to her feet.

 

He caught her arm. “I’ve studied the Flying Dutchman for years. It’s a ghost ship; it can’t be escaped. If we cross its path the captain will make demons of us both.”

 

She crossed her arms over her chest and turned to face him. “You have been betrayed and held captive for weeks because you understand the myth of the Flying Dutchman better than almost anyone. But trust me when I say, you don’t know the Dutchman better than I do. I’ve sailed your ship of demons; I’ve touched its wheel and begged it to hunt down the men who took you prisoner. Its captain is not the bloodthirsty ghoul cursed by Athena.”

 

“Scully, Philip Padgett is—”

 

“Dead,” she finished. “Padgett is dead. Captain Stella Gibson owns the title of Davy Jones, and she paid her heart to the Dutchman because she can live with herself. And  _ I  _ can live with her and trust her wholly, which means you can too. So you will follow me to that beach, and you will climb into the rowboat, and you will board the Flying Dutchman before we waste another precious second of safety.” She took a deep breath and unfolded her arms.

 

He opened his mouth, reached for her, stopped short. He nodded. “Okay, Scully.” The waver of anxiety didn’t leave his voice, but he had listened, and in his current state that was what she asked of him. “Take me to the Dutchman.”

 

She couldn’t decide if it should have been easier or more difficult to convince him. She cut another two vines, and sunlight streamed into the swamp. She breathed a sigh of relief as the glittering horizon stretched out before her, and only the beach and a thin line of trees separated her from the sea. Just around those rocks jutting out from the bay, Stella awaited them. Soon, a rowboat would emerge from the waves, rolling quietly toward them. The Dutchman knew what to do.

 

She stumbled into the uneven sand, Mulder close behind her. Her own footprints lingered on the beach, and she followed them along the tree line to where she had come ashore. She scanned the horizon for a rowboat. The sun, slinking Westward, stung her eyes and lit the waves a warm green. She shielded her eyes with one hand.

 

“Scully!” Two gunshots rang from the treeline. She could feel the bullets whiz by her at a distance, and men emerged from them like hornets from a broken nest. She whirled around in search of Mulder. “Scully!” His panicked cry cut the scene once more, as he sprinted past her, grabbing her hand and pulling her along.

 

She stumbled forward. “Mulder, stop!” She drew her pistol and turned back to the swarm of armed pirates spreading out from the trees, surrounding them. “The boat won’t make it in time!” She cocked the pistol, lips pressed tightly together; a breath escaped through her nose. There were more men than bullets. As they came closer, Scully could make out the details of their faces. Most of the men were heavy-set, well-muscled, their faces bared in exaggerated snarls. Some of them were long and thin as palm trees, their shoulders hunched as they walked. There could not have been more than twenty, but that was at least fifteen too many to have any hope of escape.

 

For a moment, she froze. The footsteps of her assailants seemed to lumber forward, creeping toward the sand but never reaching it. Mulder was behind her; he had turned around and come back toward her. It sunk it, for the first time, that she was likely going to die here. She would rot in a bloody heap in the Hall of Moerae, her corpse sharing dirt with Stella’s thumping heart. She blinked once. Twice. The thrumming of footsteps sped up again.

 

She drew her sword and tossed the pistol to Mulder. She was more skilled with the blade, and Mulder needed a weapon if they were going to put up a decent fight. No point in dying without a fight. The first rapier slid against hers with a grating clang. She parried, mounted a counterattack. He grinned at her with a set of gold teeth, and his breath reeked in her nostrils, and she thought of John Jack at the tavern. How long had it been since that night? She couldn’t remember. She slid her blade away and twisted her wrist until his rapier fell to the sand. She almost hesitated. Then she stuck him through the chest and whirled around as another sword came down over her head. She blocked it and sliced its owner across the midsection, engaging another weapon before she could watch his body keel over.

 

A gunshot echoed behind her, and a man whose sword was inches from her neck dropped dead. Behind him, Mulder stood with the pistol in his outstretched arms. Smoke curled lazily from its barrel. She nodded to him and swiftly kicked an assailant’s knees. They buckled beneath him, and he crumpled into the fray. A drip of sweat trailed down her cheek. She couldn’t keep this up forever. She blocked a blow to her ribs and returned it, meeting his every strike. She pushed him backwards with each step until her sword lodged itself in him. When she ripped it away, the tip wobbled.

 

A flash of movement caught her peripheral, through the sweat-stench and frenzy of violent bodies. An empty rowboat tossed about the waves, making its way toward her. The Dutchman had come for them. Two more gunshots sounded where Mulder was fighting. She was backing toward the sea, she knew. She could not fend off so many attackers, and Mulder would inevitably run out of bullets.

 

“Mulder!” she shouted. She fought her way toward him, now ankle deep in the waves. He caught her eye, a head taller than the man he had just shot. He looked toward the ocean again and began to make for the rowboat, but they were surrounded. She swung and shoved in the thick of the fight; she would only have to break through a few men to make it. She fended off a gleaming cutlass and started wading toward the boat, slicing at whatever came in her way. The boat jumped a whitecap; she could see it between the swaying waistcoats of buccaneers. She was so close, if only—

 

Pain ripped through her forehead. She saw red. Violent carmen, at first. Blinding. A rush of terror and then rage and then despair, one right after the other, climbing and colliding with one another like the waves at her feet. She swung at enemies unseen, anything in arm’s reach. Then, the sunlight came through, strange and lopsided and more orange than she remembered. The red still filling the edges of her vision threatened once again to consume it, now the old, familiar color of blood.

 

The pain came and went; her body swayed. Briefly, she noticed a sword come for her, and she swung at it, back and forth, stumbling and screaming. Screaming. God, what was coming out of her mouth? A frightened  _ damn you!  _ A high-pitched moan of agony, like hearing herself underwater.

 

“Scully!” Mulder’s horrified voice drifted into her consciousness. She couldn’t place exactly where it was coming from. She couldn’t see him.

 

Blood dribbled through her vision, and she reached up to stifle it. She rubbed it from her right eye, and the ocean suddenly became clear. She opened her left eye. Nothing. The initial sting had dulled to a throb from her nose to her left temple. She froze. She touched her cheek, her nose, drifted left and it was—wet, indiscernible, destroyed. She peeled her hand away uncomfortably before it could discern any further, her fingertips sticky with blood. She blinked and immediately regretted it as another wave of pain pounded through her face and forehead.

 

She felt a sword point at her back, too late to defend herself. It rested between her vertebrae, just sharp enough to make its presence known through her shirt. Why had no one killed her yet? What the hell had they done to her? She felt a set of rough hands, smaller than Mulder’s, grip her wrists. She tried to shake it off, turned her head, but the red filled her eyes again. Soon, her wrists were bound. Her sword dropped into the water, and a foggy human shape picked it up. She rubbed her right eye on her shoulder and craned her neck, spying a head of slick hair behind her, fixing her chains.

 

He stepped around her and stopped until he could look her in the face. Whatever face she  _ fucking  _ had left. She spat at him. “Who are you?” she demanded.

 

The man was clean shaven and muscular, wearing a black linen shirt and trousers. A five o’clock shadow graced his pouting chin, and the ridge of his eyebrows gave him combative visage. For a moment, he said nothing, simply eyed her up as if deciding whether she was worth an answer. She spat at him again. He wiped it off his cheek with his thumb. Chunky jeweled rings adorned his fingers. “My name’s Alex.”

 

“What do you want with me?”

 

“Tell me who you are.”

 

Scully thought back to what Mulder had told her—Spender’s betrayal, the race for Davy Jones’s heart. She lifted her chin. “Stella Gibson,” she said in her huskiest, most intimidating drawl. If she told them ‘Davy Jones,’ they might poke a few swords through her to test her claim. But no stranger on the beach was likely to know Stella Gibson captained the Dutchman—unless, of course, Captain Spector had informed them.

 

The man stiffened. He turned to the men Scully supposed were behind her. “We’re taking them to the captain,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. She felt a gruff shove from behind as she marched forward, shaking her head to knock some of the blood from her sight. Whatever they had done, her eye felt like a swollen mess.

 

Suddenly, Mulder was beside her. “Scully!” He stopped short when she looked up at him. His gaze drifted downward. His voice dropped a full octave. “Shit. Oh, shit, Scully.”

 

“What?” she snapped. “I know it’s bad. I don’t know what happened, but…” she trailed off. Uncertainty gripped her. “Mulder what does it look like?” It came out as a desperate whisper. Her lower lip trembled, from the pain or the dread she couldn’t tell. “My left eye, what does it look like?”

 

He stared at her neck. “It doesn’t,” he said. And when he did look up— “Fuck. Fucking hell. Scully, it’s just a fucking socket.” He gulped. “Fuck. It was on that man’s sword and I didn’t know what it was and—” He clamped his mouth shut. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “Scully this is all my fault I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.” He was babbling now. She wished she could clap a hand over his mouth and shut him up.

 

_ It was on that man’s sword.  _ She shivered, thankful she didn’t see it. She closed her eyes again and sniffled weakly. She could feel wind seep between her eyelids and chill the skin beneath her left socket in a way she’d never felt before. Just gone. One blue eye, stuck on a rapier and hurled into the sea. Her fucking eye. A sword had speared into her face and pulled her eye out with it. She replayed it in her head, unable to grasp that it had happened. She was startled by the logistics of it, as if analyzing the fight would save her having to deal with her new reality. Mulder, walking on her left, was hardly visible. She cocked her head slightly.

 

“You need gauze,” he said, at last meeting her stare. “Let me use your bandanna.”

 

She raised an eyebrow skeptically. She wondered if it still had the same effect. “If you haven’t noticed, my hands are tied behind my back.”

 

“Here.” He lifted his hands. They were cuffed in front, a length of chain dangling between them. He reached up to untie her bandanna as they walked and carefully re-knotted it around her forehead, to cover her eye. Her socket. The gaping fucking hole in her face.

 

“Thanks,” she whispered. If nothing else, it would keep the bleeding at bay.

 

He offered her a nervous smile. “You’re a fighter, Scully.”

 

She sniffled in response, leaning into him. Mulder’s shape was an everyday luxury, a comfort she’d been afforded for years before he left. She fit into it differently than she did Stella’s. There was always an enticing tingle with Stella, especially in the earliest days of their romance. An element of mystery that Scully suspected would dampen with time, though never truly disappear. Mulder, for all of his archives and sailors’ legends, was not a mystery but a settling bedtime story. A fairy tale told each night that never ceased to comfort her.

 

Alex led them down the beach until they reached the rowboats to the  _ Claudius.  _ Instructing several men to stay behind and continue searching for the heart, he loaded them into a boat and pushed it off shore. As quickly as Alex could row, they made their way toward the ship. In the distance, Scully could still see the Dutchman’s rowboat, disappearing around a corner, returning empty to its master. Did Stella know what had happened?

 

The deck of the Claudius was more spacious than the Flying Dutchman, and perhaps another forty men awaited them. She saw redcoat uniforms and haggard tri-corner hats alike. She supposed the Chiron lay in wait nearby, with another army of sailors and pirates, just in case trouble arrived. A crowd gathered about Alex as he moved toward the captain’s cabin. Men reached for the kerchief around Scully’s eye, and she shouldered them away, backing into the wall. Mulder smacked at the men’s errant hands, never leaving her side. She wanted to feel where her eye had been. She wanted to cry, but the salt of her tears would burn the wound.

 

Alex knocked on the captain’s cabin.

 

“Just a moment, Krycek,” called a gravelly voice. The door swung open, and there stood Governor Spender. He gnawed on the spout of his pipe, blowing a trail of smoke into Alex’s face. “Did you find the chest?”

 

“No. But we found Davy Jones. She came for the prisoner Mister Mulder.”

 

Spender’s forehead wrinkled like a cobweb. “Oh?”

 

“She said her name was Stella Gibson.”

 

“Very well,” said Spender. “Show me.”

 

Alex led him through the crowd of men. Spender was still wearing a monocle and a well-decorated uniform coat. He shuffled across the deck, his shriveled limbs trembling. When they stopped in front of her, Scully clenched her jaw.

 

Spender leaned in until she could smell the pipe weed on his breath. She coughed gracelessly in his face. When he stepped back, his whole body shook.

 

“I  _ know  _ her face!” Spender growled. “Dana Scully.” He turned his snarl upon her. “You came all this way for Fox Mulder, didn’t you? For what?” He gestured expansively to the Claudius. “This? Your capture? And look at you, throwing away an eye like that. This wasn’t your fight, Miss Scully. None of this was for your concern.”

 

“How would she know—” Alex began.

 

“Fool!” he spat at Alex. “Idiot! She is  _ not  _ Captain Gibson. She’s not Davy Jones.”

 

Then, from the webbing rang a low, thunderous threat she had not heard since Los Barriles. “You’re right. She’s not Davy Jones.” Scully dared to glance up, and perched in the ropes, pointing a cocked pistol at Spender’s face, scar gleaming across her chest in the evening light, stood Stella Gibson. “But I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After everything Scully suffered MS III And MS IV, I felt guilty putting her through this shit, but unlike Chris Carter I can promise you two things:
> 
> 1\. I actually do have a plan.
> 
> 2\. She definitely isn't pregnant.


	9. The Bargain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stella makes a bargain for Mulder and Scully's life, with dire consequences.

Stella’s eyes swept the ship dangerously, softening as they met Scully’s unbandaged one. She hopped from the ropes, landing with a thump between Spender and Scully. Scully felt half a dozen swords poke into her back as the pirates surrounded them.

 

 _Stella, I hope you know what you’re doing._  The odds stood unquestionably against them. If Stella made a sudden move, Scully was certain a rapier would stick her through. Maybe Stella couldn’t be killed, but the rest of them certainly could.

 

Spender blew a puff of smoke in her face. “You must be the Dutchman’s illustrious captain,” he drawled, gazing at her lazily. He licked his lips, and his cheeks crinkled into a sneer. “I know a man who’d pay any price to see you dead.”

Stella lifted her sword point to the old man’s neck. The redcoats closed in, bayonets raised, but Spender calmly held up his hand. He dragged from his pipe.

 

“Fetch me Paul Spector,” she snarled, low and dangerous.

 

Spender chuckled, clicking his tongue. “Now, Captain Gibson, you’re in no place to make demands of me. Even if I were to acquiesce, Captain Spector is on shore, digging up your heart. Davy Jones won’t dare chase her enemy onto dry land.”

 

He broke off into a hacking cough, doubling over, one withered hand on his knee, the other clutching his pipe. “Captain,” he rasped, his hunched body rising to meet her eyes. “What will you give  _me_  in exchange for your revenge? A heart, perhaps?”

 

“Only your own heart, still beating. I could kill you; I have nothing to lose.”

 

“Captain Gibson,” he clucked hoarsely, “let me tell you what I think. I think you’re bluffing, and in fact, you have everything to lose. I think that pretty little redhead came here on your ship, and I think you’ve come to care very much about her safety.” He nodded to a scruffy sailor beside Scully. “She’s already missing one eye. Even her out and take the other.”

 

Stella whirled like a viper, blocking the buccaneer’s strike. “Don’t you touch her.”

 

Scully writhed against her restraints. “He’s playing you,” she growled, shoving her captor with her shoulder. “He’s a coward.”

 

Mulder shifted uncomfortably.  _Careful, Scully._  She knew he was thinking it, even if he dared not speak aloud.

 

“The captain knows I’ve played her, Miss Scully,” Spender said coldly. “Who would have guessed the Dutchman’s deadalive bastard could love something through those hollow ribs of hers?”

 

Stella returned her sword to Governor Spender’s throat. “Where is Paul Spector?” she snarled. “Tell me where he is and I’ll make you a bargain you can’t refuse.”

 

Spender cleared his throat. “Spector is ashore.”

 

“Liar. You would never send Spector to shore alone. He would put that knife through my heart without hesitation, and you want me alive. Spector, though…” she tilted her head, studying the enemy with an unnerving stoicism.

 

Slowly, Spender reached into the pocket hanging from his belt and procured a small, silver blade rusted at the tip and crooked from abuse. “You’re right. I would never send him ashore if he could kill you. But if Spector wants to stab your heart, he needs this knife to do so.” His lips curled into a distorted grin. “No hard feelings, Sea Devil.”

 

Stella lifted her chin. “Perhaps a bargain. Quid pro quo. You let Mulder and Scully free, and I take their place. You bring me Paul Spector and walk away the most powerful man alive.”

 

Spender eyed her, smoke curling about his withered cheeks. “You seem adamant that Captain Spector be at your mercy.” He studied her, then blew another puff of smoke. “Why?”

 

“He’s a murderer who will serve his punishment.”

 

“We are all murderers, Gibson,” Spender patronized, clicking his tongue.

 

“He raped and murdered a woman aboard the Ophelia, and as its former captain, it is my duty to serve him justice.”

 

Spender snorted. “There is no justice among thieves,” he drawled. “Allow me to clarify my meaning: why do you think I will hand over Paul Spector at the snap of your fingers? You have many demands, Gibson, and I’ve no reason to acquiesce to such an unfavorable bargain.”

 

“Oh, I think you do,” growled Stella. “Captain Spender, you wither before our eyes. You are old, marching toward the death that will take us all, and you never knew enough about pirate myths to find my heart on your own. You  _needed_  Spector; you needed his youth and physicality, and his pirate roots. Now, though, you need him out of the way. If he got his hands on that knife he would turn on you in a heartbeat, but you can’t let that happen.” She leered at him. Scully had never seen this Stella—the vengeful Stella, tracing circles about Spenders body with her sword. It discomfited her to witness the lawless, no-holds-barred pirate in Stella, even if it manifested to earn their freedom. Perhaps it was a flawless performance, but Scully suspected that while dramatic, this Stella was not altogether a fabrication. She could feel Mulder shiver, mirroring the tingles on her spine.

 

Stella turned on her heel, her gaze sweeping Spender and his crew. “You couldn’t command the Dutchman; you couldn’t live alone with yourself in exchange for immortality. No, you only want to hold me under threat and use the Dutchman as your pawn, to destroy any competition to your country and company’s trade under the guise of bloodthirsty pirates. You’re not a corsair; you’re a statesman.

 

“And for that reason, you would do anything to make Spector disappear. At the first opportunity he’ll make off with the heart and ship himself and leave you bleeding to death beneath  _his_  flag. You knew that when you recruited him. You don’t have the manpower to kill him and his crew, so until he’s gone he’s a wrench in your plan.”

 

She lowered her sword. “Let me propose this: you let Mulder and Scully free. The Dutchman brings them home, and I remain your prisoner. Then, I duel Paul Spector to the death. With him out of your way, you take my heart, and the ship of demons sails under your command.”

 

“Scully,” Mulder whispered sharply.

 

She craned her neck to hear him. “What?”

 

“I need to know—” his voice was urgent— “do you really trust her?”

 

For an agonizing moment, Scully hesitated. She had trusted Stella nearly the night she’d met her, but somewhere down the line she’d come to desire and even love Stella Gibson. Love was dangerous, volatile, would gamble her heart in the hands of strangers if it thought they would love her back. Stella, though—she trusted Stella  _before_  she loved her, not because of it.

 

She angled her lips to his ear. “Yes Mulder. I trust her.”

 

Governor Spender seemed to shrivel beneath Stella’s glare, his face sinking haggardly into itself. He pursed his lips, and his wrinkles folded into something bitter and unhinged. He teetered on the precipice of temptation—it was so much easier to give into her demands than to resist. It was so much more pragmatic, and Scully could see Stella had backed him into a corner. He sighed raggedly and dipped his head in ascent.

 

“All right, Sea Devil. You have yourself a deal.” He nodded to his men. “Free the prisoners, but not until the moment you have her in cuffs.”

 

Stella dropped her sword and held out her wrists, but as Spender’s men reached for her, she backed into the wall of the ship until she stood between Scully and the crew. Scully could smell the sea on her hair and the gunpowder on her skin, she was so close. She breathed in the comfort of Stella.

 

“I want their weapons down,” Stella ordered.

 

Scully could see Spender redden impatiently. “Very well,” he croaked, snapping his fingers.

 

Slowly, the redcoats dropped their swords and pistols on the deck. A young man stepped forward with cuffs, and Scully winced as they clicked around Stella’s arms.

 

Stella turned to face her, coat brushing coat, skin brushing skin, if only for a moment. “Pirate’s life,” Stella whispered hoarsely. “Don’t worry for me.”

 

Scully tilted her head, to catch a glimpse of Stella’s face through her unbroken eye. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

 

“I’m saving your life,” she murmured, tightening her lips, “and I’m avenging the Ophelia. We’ve both done what we came here to do, Scully. We can ask for nothing more.”

 

Scully felt her own cuffs come loose, and beside her, Mulder let out a relieved breath. A gruff pair of hands tugged Stella’s shoulder.

 

“Go home,” she said calmly, as Spender disappeared into the Captain’s cabin, and three of his men guided Stella below deck. They carried her rapier, her pistol, her hat, reaping her history like market goods.

 

Another man in a scarlet uniform pushed Scully toward the plank. She doubled over. “Stella—” but a rough shove cut her off.

 

“The Dutchman will come for you,” promised Stella’s rolling voice. And that was the last Scully saw of her before she vanished into the brig.

 

 _The Dutchman will come for us,_  she repeated as she and Mulder were hoisted onto boxes.

 

“Whatever happened to walking the plank?” she heard Mulder grumble. He stood to her left, but where her peripheral vision might have captured him, there was only a bloody bandage and an emptiness that consumed her if she focused for too long.

 

 _The Dutchman will come for us_ , as their captors pushed their shoulders over the wall, tossed their swords and pistols into the waves, piece by piece. As crystal water churned and lapped for them, straining against the ship.  _The Dutchman will always come._ She didn’t give Spender’s men the satisfaction of seeing her flail when she leapt into the water.

 

The waves were comfortingly cool, but she struggled to stay afloat in drenched clothing. Her eyes squeezed shut, she dove to the bottom and felt around the sand for her possessions. A pistol brushed her palm almost instantly, and she recognized its engraved handle as her father’s. Otherwise, all she felt was silt and salt, engulfing her in clouds.

 

She rose again, sputtering. “Mulder!” she shouted, wiping the salt water from her eye. His blurry shape emerged further from the retreating ship, and she swam toward him frantically. “Mulder, are you all right?” She ran her hand over his soaked cheek and clung to him like a lifeline.

 

He coughed and shook out his hair. “Yes,” he croaked, “although it hardly matters.” He treaded against the Caribbean sea, exhaustion settling into his features. “We’re going to die here. Either we’ll be killed when we set foot on that island, or we’ll drown.”

 

“No. We will not die here. I came to save your life, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” She pulled him out to sea by his shirt, putting distance between them and the Claudius. Spender’s men stood like slender trees along the wall of the ship, watching them flounder at sea.

 

 _Stella._  She couldn’t help but look back at the foreboding vessel.  _Stella, Stella, Stella,_  her lover’s name crawled up her throat and into her ears, and all she could imagine when she glanced over her shoulder at the Claudius was Stella locked in its brig. Or perhaps seated across from Spender’s lecherous face, inhaling his pipe smoke. She thought of his wrinkled hands mishandling Stella’s beating heart while she wasted below deck, bent to his orders. Would Stella ever let Spender take the Dutchman from her? Or would she rather he let some hapless soldier stab her heart, and be bound to her ship for eternity? She would think of holding them off until the Dutchman returned Mulder and Scully to Port Washington.

 

 _No._  They wouldn’t go to Port Washington. Not without Stella Gibson.

 

The water bubbled beneath her feet, as if something—or someone—moved beneath her. Mulder startled from her grip, limbs flailing. He probably thought it was the fucking kraken. He swam out of the way of rising water column, coming to rest a few meters away.

 

“Mulder, come back!” she rolled her eyes. It was a familiar current, rolling beneath her. She knew what the bubbling surface of the sea churned up, and she welcomed it.

 

“Scully, you may not believe in merfolk,” he called to her, “but we don’t know what unearthly creatures live in this lagoon.”

 

The curled bow of a rowboat broke the surface with zeal, creaking and spraying sea foam into the air. Scully felt it rock against her feet as it lifted her out of the water, and its bucket began to empty the ocean from its confines. She was relieved to see her possessions—sword and all—tucked safely at her feet and didn’t bother to question their presence. Scully shivered at the sudden touch of wind as the boat slapped waves and drifted steadily toward Mulder.

 

Mulder was motionless but for his treading legs. His jaw hung open as he took in the barnacle-laden rowboat, elaborately crafted, its oars rowing themselves forward. Scully reached over the side of the boat and offered her hand. Wordlessly, he took it, and together they hauled him into the boat. A shiver slid his spine, and he drew his knees to his chest. Again, Scully was struck by his lanky frame, the weight he had lost and the dramatic sharpness of his angles. Composed of dark circles and tough bones, he needed rest. He needed food.

 

“Scully,” he breathed, shaking the saltwater from his hair and face. “Scully, where the  _hell_  are we?” He gazed at her through earnest eyes, always questioning.

 

She took a long, slow breath and looked at him— _really_  looked at him, right through his skull the way no one else could. “We’re going to the Flying Dutchman, Mulder.”

 

She wasn’t sure, after months without him, if Mulder’s silence signaled acceptance or disorientation. There was something unfathomably lonely about his features in this light, and she softened to his attitude. Instead of puzzling over him, she watched the cliffs pass them by as they arced around a rocky peninsula. Slowly, the cliffs gave way to open ocean. Slowly, the Dutchman’s bare masts and Jolly Rodger fell into view. Its greened boards, suffocated by barnacles and slick seaweed, its bundled sails, its proud stern reaching for gulls overhead.

 

_The Dutchman will always come._

 

The rowboat tucked into the side of the ship, and she reached for the rope ladder to pull herself over the wall. Mulder followed her lead, still quiet, still stunned. As soon as they had boarded the ship, the sails dropped around them, and she heard the anchor rise. Wind billowed toward the island, beating their sails relentlessly, and the Dutchman braced against it.

 

Mulder craned his neck to the flag. Scully remembered the owl perched atop the crow’s nest, now nowhere to be seen. As she gathered her sword and coat from the rowboat, where it hung over the side of Stella’s ship, Mulder wandered aimlessly about the deck, soaking wet and utterly confused.

 

“Mulder,” she called and angled her head to the Captain’s cabin. “Come on.”

 

He followed her into the lush cabin. Stella’s clothing was still strewn to dry over the fireplace. Stella’s bandanna rested on a chair. The bedroom door hung open, revealing tousled sheets, the smell of candles and rum. She hung her coat by the fire and went into the bedroom to change.

 

When she came out, bearing clean clothes and bottle of rum, she found Mulder seated in a dining chair, resting his chin on his hand and focusing intensely on nothing in particular. She tossed him an oversized linen shirt, the same shirt of her brother’s that she had stolen the night she stowed away. It landed on the table in front of him. “It’s dry,” she explained nonchalantly. A pause. “Mulder?”

 

He shook himself from a stupor. “I’m sorry, I just… I’m not used to this.”

 

“Not used to what?”

 

“This place.” He sounded affronted that she’d even ask. “This ghost ship, this pirate life, this—” he gestured between them. “— _thing_  of getting used to each other again. I don’t know what to make of it yet.”

 

She felt for a moment as though she’d taken his place. Mulder was the man of myths and archives, and here she was striding about the home of Davy Jones, loving a living legend. And here Mulder sat, mere hours out of captivity. There was the loneliness again, seeping into his hazel eyes, and it only then struck her how long they had both been away from home.

 

Mulder had been gone for months, and the Scully who found him was not the Scully he left. She’d seen monsters of which he could only dream. She knew the sea like he’d never had a chance to learn, and now, he was alone in the Caribbean, re-learning the woman he once knew best.

 

“Mulder,” she said softly, sitting down beside him and taking his hands into hers. “You don’t have to be accustomed to me yet. I’ve lived like a pirate for the last few moons. Hell, I’ve lived with an undead pirate. I can’t pretend to understand what you’ve been through, and you cannot understand what I went through to get you back, but I would do it all over again. Every day, every fucking day of it.”

 

At that, he grinned, lopsided and child-like. “You’re crasser than the Scully I left behind.” Gingerly, he touched the bandage wound around her eye, and his lip trembled. “I’m sorry for what happened, Scully. I’m sorry for your eye, and… I’m sorry for Stella.”

 

The cadence of his voice gave her pause. He was apologizing, but also asking—how close was she to Stella Gibson? She faltered, unsure whether she was prepared to answer.

 

“It’s okay,” she promised. She leaned forward until her forehead balanced against his. “It’s okay. I’m going to get her back.”

 

Mulder lifted his head, just barely. He nodded and asked, still running his thumb comfortingly over her hand, still holding her like he had so many times, “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

 

She couldn’t swallow the sob that seized her. It squeezed her throat like a kraken’s arm. Tears welled in her eye, threatening to spill and pool into the sleepless bags above her cheeks. Her lip trembled, and she allowed herself to sink into Mulder’s arms as she wept. Not just for Stella, but for her bloody eye socket, for Mulder’s gaunt face, for the life they were walking into. She wept for her mother alone in the house on the hill, for the nameless woman who died at Spector’s hand, and for Dani and Tom on the Ophelia listening to their captain sing as she sliced out her own heart.

 

Maybe,  _maybe_ , Scully understood now, why Stella locked herself alone in that cabin. Why she hunched against a rocking cabinet and sang to drown out her own pain when she shoved Padgett’s knife into her sternum. Why she took the chest from her father’s nightstand, why she sequestered herself on a ship of ghosts.

 

“I don’t know,” she croaked.  _Maybe she loves her. Almost, if only with more time and less urgency._

 

“Oh, Scully.” Mulder engulfed her in a hug, settling her chin on his head and stroking her shorn hair. “She would only do that for someone she loves unequivocally, you know that.”

 

She whimpered, tried too hard not to. “I know.”

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

 _What Stella would do._  “I’m going—” a painful hiccup— “I’m going to save her. We’re going to save her.”

 

Mulder released her with a warm smile. “That’s the Scully I know and love.”

 

Shakily, Scully got to her feet. Her eye was beginning to throb, like tiny bullets pulsing through her skull. She swallowed hard and ignored the sting of salt on blood. “The Dutchman was ordered to take us home,” she told Mulder, slowly regaining her staunch confidence. “We’re going to change its mind.”

 

She snatched Stella’s bandanna off the chair and with delicate fingers, pulled the soaked rag off her face. That was where the rum came in—it would clean the salt and dirt from her wound, at least temporarily, and prevent the worst infections until she could properly look after it. One hand covered her good eye; the other topped the bottle with her thumb and dribbled it messily into where she thought the bloody socket would be. She winced as it touched her skin and squeezed Mulder’s hand. If she was hurting him, he didn’t protest. Satisfied the booze had done its job, she tied Stella’s kerchief around her head. It seemed the bleeding had stopped, at least, because all she smelled in the new tourniquet was alcohol.

 

She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through tight lips. “Let’s go.”

 

Ropes flew about the deck, and sails twerked and flapped, lusting after a tailwind. Scully climbed the stairs to the wheel and grasped its spoke, just as she’d seen Stella do so many times, wrapping her fingers around the smooth wood and angling her body to the horizon. Today, though, she tore the Dutchman away from the dome of a setting sun. She tugged the wheel toward the Hall of the Moerae, but it resisted.

 

Mulder hurried up the stairs. She beckoned to the wheel, “Mulder, help me out,” and he grabbed onto another spoke, pulling with all his might. The wheel didn’t budge.

 

“The Dutchman wants to go to sea,” he said defeatedly, letting go of the wheel and resting his hands on his knees. “Stella told it to take us home, and it only listens to its captain.”

 

Scully narrowed her eye. She folded her arms over her chest, arched her eyebrow skeptically. If this ship would obey Stella, it could listen to her. “Not today.” She lifted her arms and swept the ship with a hardened visage and a challenging eye. “You hear that?” she shouted. “You will listen to me! All of you! Every ruined soul on this ship will stop what it’s doing and  _listen_!” She unsheathed her sword—Stella’s father’s sword—with a smooth  _snick_ , and raised it to the sails, curling her fist around the railing and planting her feet on the stern.

 

“If you ever want to see a Heaven or an Underworld, you will obey my command. Davy Jones isn’t here! I am! The wind’s on my side, and the Dutchman  _will_  sail for me. Now I want a full canvas, and every cannon at the ready.” She approached the wheel and gave it an experimental thrust. It creaked and spun, humming like a cricket on its axle, and the ship groaned beneath her feet as it banked starboard.

 

Scully narrowed her eyes at the approaching cliffs. “Mulder!” she snapped. He looked at her with a combination of pride and awe. “Get up to the crow’s nest, now!”

 

He nodded and with neither pause nor question hurried down the stairs, hopping on to the foremast webbing. He climbed like a spider. Scully followed him, clambering up the stale ropes until she reached the glorified bucket where she could overlook the island. “Now,” she told the ship, “Sink, undetected, until the only thing above water is our heads.”

 

Mulder looked at her as if she’d gone insane, but he didn’t protest. Slowly, the sea approached them, the Dutchman disappearing undersea as if it had never been more than a mirage. The sea lapped at her chest, but she kept her feet planted firmly atop the mast. They drifted past the white cliffs, past hordes of screaming gulls and back into the lagoon. The Claudius hadn’t budged. Then, as she surveyed the shoreline, her breath caught in her throat.

 

Specks of men in rowboats, approaching the Claudius. In the front boat, a man stood stiff against the whitecaps, carrying what looked like a treasure chest under his arm. So, he had found Stella’s heart after all. She stiffened, and underwater Mulder clasped her hand. “They knew where to look,” he murmured gravely.

 

Scully clenched her jaw. “He won’t open it. Not before I blow him to smithereens.”

 

“What about Stella?”

 

The wan smile that passed Scully’s lips was chilling, and she allowed it to be. “Stella can’t die.”

 

They closed in on the unsuspecting redcoats, creeping up until they nearly paralleled the Claudius. “Hold on, Mulder,” she muttered, then to the ship, barely louder— “Cannons at the ready, rise for battle.”

 

She gripped the flagpole with both hands as the mast rumbled, and the water at her neck roiled violently. The ocean shook like its gods were rising from the sand, and all Hell was coming loose. The Dutchman erupted toward the sky, arching backwards and then hurling its weight toward the bow. Scully could hear Spender’s men shout and curse, and in her peripheral, she spotted some of them scrambling chaotically about the Claudius’s deck. Others stood stone-still, as if they hadn’t believed the Dutchman truly existed. A surge of electricity ran through Scully’s veins, towering as she was beside the Jolly Rodger. Her lip curled; the ragged, rum-soaked ends of her bandage flapped in the breeze; she faced head-on the men who took her captain and her eye, as she bellowed from deep in her chest, “Fire all!”

 

Cannons rattled. The Claudius didn’t even have time to open its gun ports before cannonballs ripped through its flank. Flames erupted from the ballast first, barrels of gunpowder shooting into the sky. The ship’s starboard flank shone like a foreboding dawn, before it burst into splinters and ash with a force that rocked the Dutchman. Soldiers and buccaneers alike leapt into the water; wreckage flew in all directions. The sky turned the color of rotting wood as the ship smoldered. The mizzenmast was the first to fall, toppling into the quarterdeck with a resounding  _crack_. Then, the other two poles, the black flag flailing with them. The ship split in half; fire burst from its underbelly.

 

The Dutchman fired its last row of cannonballs and sailed out of its way. Scully watched the destruction, her mouth set in a grim line.  _If you want to live, you have to be able to live your own actions,_ Stella’s voice rang in her head. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning wood. She could live with this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This. Chapter. Sucked up so much of my life. It consumed me, toward the end, because I just couldn't seem to finish it no matter how hard I tried. Anyway, I'm relieved and proud to see it done, and now we're at the part where nearly everything is packed with either romance or swashbuckling action, so there's that.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr at poeticsandaliens, and some of my other works under the joint head SassSexandSmut


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